Wallace Stevens The Necessary Angel Essays On Reality And The Imagination

'( J SS

evsus

Essays on Reality and

the Imagination

These are Borzoi Books
■published by Alfred A Knopf

The poetry of WALLACE STEVENS

Harmonium (1923, 193 1, 1947)

Ideas of Order (1936)

The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)

Parts 0/ a World (194a, 1951)

Transport to Summer ( 1 947 )

The Auroras of Autumn (1950)

NOTE

The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) includes OwTs
Clover; Transport to Summer (1947) includes Es-
thetique du Mai and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.
The Man with the Blue Guitar and Ideas of Order are
scheduled for republication in 1952 in a single volume
to carry the title The Man with the Blue Guitar

THE

NECESSARY ANGEL

THE

NECESSARY ANGEL

Essays on Reality and the Imagination
BY

WALLACE STEVENS

New York Alfred A Knopf 1951

L C catalog card number 51-12072

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, ^

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF, INC ifc

Copyright 1942, 1944, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1951 by Waliace
Stevens AH rights reserved No part of this book may be repro-
duced m any forpi without permission in writing from the pub-
lisher, except by'ia reviewer who may quote brief passages in a
review to be pnttted in a magazine or newspaper Manufactured
in the United States of America Published simultaneously m
Canada by McClelland & Stewart Limited

FIRST EDITION

... 7 am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.

THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

[vii]

INTRODUCTION

One function of the poet at any time is to discover
by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be
poetry at that time Ordinarily he will disclose what he
finds in his own poetry by way of the poetry itself He
exercises this function most often without being con-
scious of it, so that the disclosures m his poetry, while
they define what seems to him to be poetry, are dis-
closures of poetry, not disclosures of definitions of poetry
The papers that have been collected here are intended to
disclose definitions of poetry In short, they are intended
to be contributions to the theory of poetry and it is this
and this alone that binds them together

Obviously, they are not the carefully organized notes
of systematic study Except for the paper on one of Miss
Moore's poems, they were written to be spoken and this
affects their character. While all of them were published,
after they had served the purposes for which they were
written, I had no thought of making a book out of them
Several years ago, when this was suggested, I felt that
their occasional and more or less informal character made
it desirable at least to postpone coming to a decision The
theory of poetry, as a subject of study, was something
with respect to which I had nothing but the most ardent

Vlll INTRODUCTION

ambitions. It seemed to me to be one of the great subjects
of study. I do not mean one more Ars Poetica having to
do, say, with the techniques of poetry and perhaps with
its history I mean poetry itself, the naked poem, the im-
agination manifesting itself in its domination of words.
The few pages that follow are, now, alas' the only reali-
zation possible to me of those excited ambitions.

But to their extent they are a realization; and it is be-
cause that is true, that is to say, because they seem to
me to commumcate to the reader the portent of the sub-
ject, if nothing more, that they are presented here. Only
recently I spoke of certain poetic acts as subtilizing ex-
perience and varying appearance: "The real is constantly
being engulfed in the unreal. . . . [Poetry] is an illumi-
nation of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock."
A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality
in words free from mysticism is a force independent of
one's desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has
only to be presented, as best one is able to present it.
These are not pages of criticism nor of philosophy. Nor
are they merely literary pages. They are pages that have
to do with one of the enlargements of life. They are with-
out pretence beyond my desire to add my own definition
to poetry's many existing definitions.

WALLACE STEVENS

N

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words was read at
Princeton, as one of a group of essays by several -persons
on The Language of Poetry, made possible by the interest
and generosity of Mr. and Mrs Henry Church, and was
published by the Princeton University Press in 1942,
The Language of Poetry was edited by Allen Tate The
Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet was read at the En-
tretiens de Pontigny, a conference held at Mount Holyoke
College in 1943. The essay was published in Sewanee
Review the following year. Three Academic Pieces was
read at Harvard on the basis of the Morris Gray Fund
Later, in 1 947, it was published by Partisan Review and
also by Cummington Press About One of Marianne
Moore's Poems was published in Quarterly Review of
Literature m 1948 m a number in honor of Miss Moore.
Effects of Analogy was read as a Bergen lecture at Yale
and was published a little later, in 1 948, in the Yale Re-
view Imagination as Value was read at Columbia before
the English Institute and was included in the volume of
English Institute Essays 1948 published by the Colum-
bia University Press m 1949 The Relations between
Poetry and Painting was read in New York at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in 1951 and was thereafter pub-

X ACKNOWLEDGMENT

lished by the Museum as a -pamphlet. In The Relations
between Poetry and Painting the quotation from Leo
Steins Appreciation is printed with permission of Crown
Publishers (copyright 1947 by Leo Stein)

The author is happy to say thanks to all these and, in
particular, to the magazines and presses for the assign-
ments of copyrights which have made it possible to gather
these essays together.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. The Nohh Rider and the Sound of Words i

II The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 37

III. Three Academic Pieces 69

IV About One of Marianne Moore^s Poems 9 1

V. Effects of Analogy 105

VI Imagination as Value 131

VII The Relations between Poetry and Painting 157

I

The Noble Rider
and the Sound of Words

[ 3 ]

I

_n the Phaedrus, Plato speaks of the soul in a figure.
He says.

Let our figure be of a composite nature — a pair of
■winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses
and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble, and
of noble breed, while ours are mixed, and we have a
charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is
noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of
ignoble origin; and, as might be expected, there is a great
deal of trouble in managing them I will endeavor to ex-
plain to you in what way the mortal differs from the im-
mortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care
of the inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in di-
vers forms appearing, — when perfect and fully winged
she soars upward, and is the ruler of the universe, while
the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her
flight at hst settles on the solid ground.

We recognize at once, in this figure, Plato's pure po-
etry, and at the same time we recognize what Coleridge
called Plato's dear, gorgeous nonsense The truth is that
we have scarcely read the passage before we have identi-
fied ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his

4 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the
whole heaven. Then suddenly we remember, it may be,
that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight
and at last settle on the solid ground. The figure becomes
antiquated and rustic.

What really happens in this brief experience? Why
does this figure, potent for so long, become merely the
emblem of a mythology, the rustic memorial of a belief in
the soul and in a distinction between good and evil? The
answer to these questions is, I think, a simple one.

I said that suddenly we remember that the soul no
longer exists and we droop in our flight. For that matter,
neither charioteers nor chariots any longer exist. Con-
sequently, the figure does not become unreal because we
are troubled about the soul Besides, unreal things have
a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere We do not
hesitate, in poetry, to yield ourselves to the unreal, when
it is possible to yield ourselves. The existence of the soul,
of charioteers and chariots and of winged horses is im-
material They did not exist for Plato, not even the chari-
oteer and chariot, for certainly a charioteer driving his
chariot across the whole heaven was for Plato precisely
what he is for us. He was unreal for Plato as he is for us
Plato, however, could yield himself, was free to yield
himself, to this gorgeous nonsense We cannot yield our-
selves. We are not free to yield ourselves.

Just as the difficulty is not a difficulty about unreal

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 5

things, since the imagination accepts them, and since the
poetry of the passage is, for us, wholly the poetry of the
unreal, so it is not an emotional difficulty. Something else
than the imagination is moved by the statement that the
horses of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble
breed or origin. The statement is a moving statement and
is intended to be so. It is insistent and its insistence
moves us. Its insistence is the insistence of a speaker, in
this case Socrates, who, for the moment, feels delight,
even if a casual delight, in the nobility and noble breed.
Those images of nobility instantly become nobility itself
and determine the emotional level at which the next page
or two are to be read The figure does not lose its vitality
because of any failure of feeling on Plato's part He does
not commumcate nobility coldly. His horses are not mar-
ble horses, the reference to their breed saves them from
being that The fact that the horses are not marble horses
helps, moreover, to save the charioteer from being, say,
a creature of cloud. The result is that we recognize, even
if we cannot realize, the feelings of the robust poet clearly
and fluently noting the images in his mind and by means
of his robustness, clearness and fluency communicating
much more than the images themselves. Yet we do not
quite yield. We cannot. We do not feel free.

In trying to find out what it is that stands between
Plato's figure and ourselves, we have to accept the idea
that, however legendary it appears to be, it has had its
vicissitudes. The history of a figure of speech or the his-
tory of an idea, such as the idea of nobility, cannot be

6 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

very different from the history of anything else It is the
episodes that are of interest, and here the episode is that
of our diffidence. By us and ourselves, I mean you and
me; and yet not you and me as individuals but as repre-
sentatives of a state of mmd Adams in his work on Vico
makes the remark that the true history of the human race
is a history of its progressive mental states It is a remark
of interest in this relation. We may assume that in the
history of Plato's figure there have been incessant changes
of response, that these changes have been psychological
changes, and that our own diffidence is simply one more
state of mind due to such a change.

The specific question is partly as to the nature of the
change and partly as to the cause of it In nature, the
change is as follows The imagination loses vitality as it
ceases to adhere to what is real When it adheres to the
unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect
may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect
that it will ever have In Plato's figure, his imagination
does not adhere to what is real. On the contrary, having
created something unreal, it adheres to it and intensifies
its unreality. Its first effect, its effect at first reading, is
its maximum effect, when the imagination, being moved,
puts us in the place of the charioteer, before the reason
checks us The case is, then, that we concede that the
figure is all imagination. At the same time, we say that
it has not the slightest meaning for us, except for its no-
bility. As to that, while we are moved by it, we are
moved as observers. We recognize it perfectly We do

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 7

not realize it. We -understand the feeling of it, the robust
feeling, clearly and fluently communicated. Yet we un-
derstand it rather than participate in it.

As to the cause of the change, it is the loss of the
figure's vitality. The reason why this particular figure has
lost its vitality is that, in it, the imagination adheres to
what is unreal. What happened, as we were traversing
the whole heaven, is that the imagination lost its power
to sustain us. It has the strength of reality or none at all

What has just been said demonstrates that there are
degrees of the imagination, as, for example, degrees of
vitality and, therefore, of intensity. It is an implication
that there are degrees of reality. The discourse about the
two elements seems endless. For my own part, I intend
merely to follow, in a very hasty way, the fortunes of the
idea of nobility as a characteristic of the imagination, and
even as its symbol or alter ego, through several of the
episodes in its history, in order to determine, if possible,
what its fate has been and what has determined its fate.
This can be done only on the basis of the relation be-
tween the imagination and reality. What has been said in
respect to the figure of the charioteer illustrates this.

I should like now to go on to other illustrations of the
relation between the imagination and reality and particu-
larly to illustrations that constitute episodes in the history
of the idea of nobility. It would be agreeable to pass di-
rectly from the charioteer and his winged horses to Don

8 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

Quixote. It would be like a return from what Plato calls
"the back of heaven" to one's own spot. Nevertheless,
there is Verrocchio (as one among others) with his
statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, in Venice, standing in
the way. I have not selected him as a Neo-Platonist to re-
late us back from a modern time to Plato's time, although
he does in fact so relate us, Just as through Leonardo, his
pupil, he strengthens the relationship. I have selected
him because there, on the edge of the world in which we
live today, he established a form of such nobility that it
has never ceased to magnify us in our own eyes. It is like
the form of an invincible man, who has come, slowly and
boldly, through every warlike opposition of the past and
who moves in our midst without dropping the bridle of
the powerful horse from his hand, without taking off his
helmet and without relaxing the attitude of a warrior of
noble origin. What man on whose side the horseman
fought could ever be anything but fearless, anything but
indomitable? One feels the passion of rhetoric begin to
stir and even to grow furious; and one thinks that, after
all, the noble style, in whatever it creates, merely per-
petuates the noble style. In this statue, the apposition be-
tween the imagination and reality is too favorable to the
imagination. Our difficulty is not primarily with any de-
tail. It is primarily with the whole. The point is not so
much to analyze the difficulty as to determine whether
we share it, to find out whether it exists, whether we re-
gard this specimen of the genius of Verrocchio and of the
Renaissance as a bit of uncommon panache, no longer

The Nohle Rider and the Sound of Words 9

quite the appropriate thing outdoors, or whether we re-
gard it, in the language of Dr. Richards, as something in-
exhaustible to meditation or, to speak for myself, as a
thing of a nobility responsive to the most minute demand.
It seems, nowadays, what it may very well not have
seemed a few years ago, a little overpowering, a little
magnificent.

Undoubtedly, Don Quixote could be Bartolommeo
Colleoni in Spam. The tradition of Italy is the tradition
of the imagination. The tradition of Spain is the tradition
of reality. There is no apparent reason why the reverse
should not be true. If this is a just observation, it indi-
cates that the relation between the imagination and real-
ity is a question, more or less, of precise equilibrium.
Thus it is not a question of the difference between gro-
tesque extremes. My purpose is not to contrast Colleoni
with Don Quixote. It is to say that one passed into the
other, that one became and was the other. The difference
between them is that Verrocchio believed in one kind of
nobility and Cervantes, if he believed in any, believed in
another kind. With Verrocchio it was an affair of the
noble style, whatever his prepossession respecting the no-
bility of man as a real animal may have been. With
Cervantes, nobility was not a thing of the imagination.
It was a part of reality, it was something that exists in
life, something so true to us that it is in danger of ceasing
to exist, if we isolate it, something in the mind of a pre-
carious tenure. These may be words. Certainly, however,
Cervantes sought to set right the balance between the

IO THE NECESSARY ANGEL

imagination and reality As we come closer to our own
times in Don Quixote and as we are drawn together by
the intelligence common to the two periods, we may de-
rive so much satisfaction from the restoration of reality
as to become wholly prejudiced against the imagination
This is to reach a conclusion prematurely, let alone that
it may be to reach a conclusion in respect to something as
to which no conclusion is possible or desirable.

There is in Washington, in Lafayette Square, which is
the square on which the White House faces, a statue of
Andrew Jackson, riding a horse with one of the most
beautiful tails in the world General Jackson is raising his
hat in a gay gesture, saluting the ladies of his generation.
One looks at this work of Clark Mills and thinks of the
remark of Bertrand Russell that to acquire immunity to
eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of
a democracy. We are bound to think that Colleoni, as a
mercenary, was a much less formidable man than Gen-
eral Jackson, that he meant less to fewer people and that,
if Verrocchio could have applied his prodigious poetry to
Jackson, the whole American outlook today might be
imperial. This work is a work of fancy. Dr. Richards
cites Coleridge's theory of fancy as opposed to imagina-
tion. Fancy is an activity of the mind which puts things
together of choice, not the will, as a principle of the
mind's being, striving to realize itself in knowing itself.
Fancy, then, is an exercise of selection from among ob-
jects already supplied by association, a selection made for
purposes which are not then and therein being shaped

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

ii

but have been already fixed We are concerned then with
an object occupying a position as remarkable as any that
can be found in the United States in which there is not
the slightest trace of the imagination. Treating this work
as typical, it is obvious that the American will as a prin-
ciple of the mind's being is easily satisfied in its efforts
to realize itself in knowing itself The statue may be dis-
missed, not without speaking of it again as a thing that
at least makes us conscious of ourselves as we were, if
not as we are. To that extent, it helps us to know our-
selves. It helps us to know ourselves as we were and that
helps us to know ourselves as we are. The statue is
neither of the imagination nor of reality. That it is a work
of fancy precludes it from being a work of the imagina-
tion. A glance at it shows it to be unreal. The bearing of
this is that there can be works, and this includes poems,
in which neither the imagination nor reality is present.

The other day I was reading a note about an American
artist who was said to have "turned his back on the aes-
thetic whims and theories of the day, and established
headquarters in lower Manhattan. 11 Accompanying this
note was a reproduction of a painting called Wooden
Horses. It is a painting of a merry-go-round, possibly of
several of them One of the horses seems to be prancing
The others are going lickety-split, each one struggling to
get the bit in his teeth The horse in the center of the
picture, painted yellow, has two riders, one a man,
dressed in a carnival costume, who is seated in the saddle,
the other a blonde, who is seated well up the horse's

12 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

neck The man has his arms under the girl's arms. He
holds himself stiffly in order to keep his cigar out of the
girl's hair. Her feet are in a second and shorter set of
stirrups. She has the legs of a hammer-thrower It is clear
that the couple are accustomed to wooden horses and like
them. A little behind them is a younger girl riding alone.
She has a strong body and streaming hair. She wears a
short-sleeved, red waist, a white skirt and an emphatic
bracelet of pink coral She has her eyes on the man's
arms. Still farther behind, there is another girl. One does
not see much more of her than her head Her lips are
painted bright red. It seems that it would be better if
someone were to hold her on her horse We, here, are not
interested in any aspect of this picture except that it is a
picture of ribald and hilarious reality It is a picture
wholly favorable to what is real It is not without im-
agination and it is far from being without aesthetic
theory.

3

These illustrations of the relation between the imagina-
tion and reality are an outline on the basis of which to in-
dicate a tendency Their usefulness is this that they help
to make clear, what no one may ever have doubted, that
just as in this or that work the degrees of the imagination
and of reality may vary, so this variation may exist as be-
tween the works of one age and the works of another
What I have said up to this point amounts to this that
the idea of nobility exists in art today only in degenerate

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 13

forms or in a much diminished state, if, in fact, it exists at
all or otherwise than on sufferance, that this is due to fail-
ure in the relation between the imagination and reality.
I should now like to add that this failure is due, in turn,
to the pressure of reality.

A variation between the sound of words in one age
and the sound of words in another age is an instance of
the pressure of reality Take the statement by Bateson
that a language, considered semantically, evolves through
a series of conflicts between the denotative and the con-
notative forces in words, between an asceticism tending
to kill language by stripping words of all association and
a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their
sense in a multiplicity of associations. These conflicts are
nothing more than changes in the relation between the
imagination and reality. Bateson describes the seven-
teenth century in England as predominately a connota-
tive period. The use of words m connotative senses was
denounced by Locke and Hobbes, who desired a mathe-
matical plainness, in short, perspicuous words There
followed in the eighteenth century an era of poetic dic-
tion. This was not the language of the age but a language
of poetry peculiar to itself In time, "Wordsworth came to
write the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Bal-
lads ( 1 800) , in which he said that the first volume had
been published, "as an experiment, which, I hoped, might
be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical
arrangement a selection of the real language of man in a
state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that

14 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may
rationally endeavour to impart "

As the nineteenth century progressed, language once
more became connotative While there have been in-
termediate reactions, this tendency toward the connota-
tive is the tendency today. The interest in semantics is
evidence of this. In the case of some of our prose writers,
as, for example, Joyce, the language, in quite different
ways, is wholly connotative When we say that Locke
and Hobbes denounced the connotative use of words as
an abuse, and when we speak of reactions and reforms,
we are speaking, on the one hand, of a failure of the im-
agination to adhere to reality, and, on the other, of a use
of language favorable to reality The statement that the
tendency toward the connotative is the tendency today is
disputable. The general movement in the arts, that is to
say, in painting and in music, has been the other way It
is hard to say that the tendency is toward the connotative
in the use of words without also saying that the tendency
is toward the imagination in other directions. The inter-
est in the subconscious and in surrealism shows the tend-
ency toward the imaginative Boileaus remark that Des-
cartes had cut poetry's throat is a remark that could have
been made respecting a great many people during the
last hundred years, and of no one more aptly than of
Freud, who, as it happens, was familiar with it and re-
peats it in his Future of an Illusion The object of that
essay was to suggest a surrender to reality His premise
was that it is the unmistakable character of the present

The Nohle Rider and the Sound of Words 15

situation not that the promises of religion have become
smaller but that they appear less credible to people. He
notes the decline of religious belief and disagrees with the
argument that man cannot in general do without the con-
solation of what he calls the religious illusion and that
without it he would not endure the cruelty of reality. His
conclusion is that man must venture at last into the hos-
tile world and that this maybe called education to reality.
There is much more in that essay inimical to poetry and
not least the observation in one of the final pages that
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not
rest until it has gained a hearing.'" This, I fear, is in-
tended to be the voice of the realist.

A tendency in language toward the connotative might
very well parallel a tendency in other arts toward the de-
notative. We have just seen that that is in fact the situa-
tion I suppose that the present always appears to be an
illogical complication The language of Joyce goes along
with the dilapidations of Braque and Picasso and the mu-
sic of the Austrians. To the extent that this painting and
this music are the work of men who regard it as part of
the science of painting and the science of music it is the
work of realists. Actually its effect is that of the imagina-
tion, just as the effect of abstract painting is so often that
of the imagination, although that may be different Bu-
soni said, in a letter to his wife, "I have made the painful
discovery that nobody loves and feels music. 11 Very
likely, the reason there is a tendency in language toward
the connotative today is that there are many who love it

1 6 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

and feel it. It may be that Braque and Picasso love and
feel painting and that Schonberg loves and feels music,
although it seems that what they love and feel is some-
thing else.

A tendency toward the connotative, whether in lan-
guage or elsewhere, cannot continue against the pressure
of reality. If it is the pressure of reality that controls po-
etry, then the immediacy of various theories of poetry is
not what it was. For instance, when Rostrevor Hamilton
says, "The object of contemplation is the highly complex
and unified content of consciousness, which comes into
being through the developing subjective attitude of the
percipient," he has in mind no such "content of con-
sciousness" as every newspaper reader experiences today.

By way of further illustration, let me quote from
Croce^ Oxford lecture of 1933. He said "If . . . poetry
'-'is intuition and expression, the fusion of sound and im-
agery, what is the material which takes on the form of
sound and imagery? It is the whole man. the man who
thinks and wills, and loves, and hates, who is strong and
weak, sublime and pathetic, good and wicked, man in the '
exultation and agony of living, and together with the
man, integral with him, it is all nature in its perpetual
labour of evolution. . . . Poetry ... is the triumph
of contemplation. . . . Poetic genius chooses a strait
path in which passion is calmed and calm is passionate " '

Croce cannot have been thinking of a world in which
all normal life is at least in suspense, or, if you like, under
blockage. He was thinking of normal human experience.

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 17

Quite apart from the abnormal aspect of everyday life
today, there is the normal aspect of it. The spirit of nega-
tion has been so active, so confident and so intolerant that
the commonplaces about the romantic provoke us to won-
der if our salvation, if the way out, is not the romantic
All the great things have been denied and we live m an
intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, eco-
nomic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging
incoherence. This is accompanied by an absence of any
authority except force, operative or imminent. What has
been called the disparagement of reason is an instance of
the absence of authority. We pick up the radio and find
that comedians regard the public use of words of more
than two syllables as funny We read of the opening of
the National Gallery at Washington and we are con-
vinced, in the end, that the pictures are counterfeit, that
museums are impositions and that Mr. Mellon was a
monster We turn to a recent translation of Kierkegaard
and we find him saying: "A great deal has been said
about poetry reconciling one with existence; rather it
might be said that it arouses one against existence; for
poetry is unjust to men ... it has use only for the elect,
but that is a poor sort of reconciliation. I will take the
case of sickness. Aesthetics replies proudly and quite
consistently, 'That cannot be employed, poetry must not
become a hospital 1 Aesthetics culminates ... by re-
garding sickness in accordance with the principle enunci-
ated by Friedrich Schlegel l Nur Gesundheit ist liebens-
wurdig 1 (Health alone is lovable.)"

1 8 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

The enormous influence of education in giving every-
one a little learning, and in giving large groups consider-
ably more something of history, something of philoso-
phy, something of literature, the expansion of the middle
class with its common preference for realistic satisfac-
tions, the penetration of the masses of people by the ideas
of liberal thinkers, even when that penetration is indirect,
as by the reporting of the reasons why people oppose the
ideas that they oppose, — these are normal aspects of ev-
eryday life The way we live and the way we work alike
cast us out on reality If fifty private houses were to be
built in New York this year, it would be a phenomenon
We no longer live in homes but in housing projects and
this is so whether the project is literally a project or a club,
a dormitory, a camp or an apartment in River House It is
not only that there are more of us and that we are actually
close together. We are close together in every way We
he in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on.
There is no distance We are intimate with people we
have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with
us Democntus plucked his eye out because he could not
look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman
If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn
himself to pieces Dr Richards has noted "the wide-
spread increase in the aptitude of the average mind for
self-dissolving introspection, the generally heightened
awareness of the goings-on of our own minds, merely as
gomgs-on " This is nothing to the generally heightened
awareness of the gomgs-on of other people's minds,

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 19

merely as goings-on The way we work is a good deal
more difficult for the imagination than the highly civilized
revolution that is occurring in respect to work indicates.
It is, m the main, a revolution for more pay. We have
been assured, by every visitor, that the American busi-
nessman is absorbed in his business and there is nothing
to be gained by disputing it. As for the workers, it is
enough to say that the word has grown to be literary.
They have become, at their work, in the face of the ma-
chines, something approximating an abstraction, an en-
ergy. The time must be coming when, as they leave the
factories, they will be passed through an air-chamber or
a bar to revive them for riot and reading. I am sorry to
have to add that to one that thinks, as Dr Richards
thinks, that poetry is the supreme use of language, some
of the foreign univer sides in relation to our own appear
to be, so far as the things of the imagination are con-
cerned, as Verroccmo is to the sculptor of the statue of
General Jackson

These, nevertheless, are not the things that I had in
mind when I spoke of the pressure of reality. These con-
stitute the drift of incidents, to which we accustom our-
selves as to the weather. Materialism is an old story and
an indifferent one. Robert Wolseley said "True genius
. . . will enter into the hardest and dryest thing, enrich
the most barren Soyl, and inform the meanest and most
uncomely matter ... the baser, the emptier, the ob-
scurer, the fouler, and the less susceptible of Ornament
the subject appears to be, the more is the Poet's Praise

2,0 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

. . who, as Horace says of Homer, can fetch Light
out of Smoak, Roses out of Dunghills, and give a kind
of Life to the Inanimate ." (Preface to Rochester's
Valentinian, 1685, English Association Essays and
Studies 1939) By the pressure of reality, I mean the
pressure of an external event or events on the conscious-
ness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation The
definition ought to be exact and, as it is, may be merely
pretentious But when one is trying to think of a whole
generation and of a world at war, and trying at the same
time to see what is happening to the imagination, particu-
larly if one believes that that is what matters most, the
plainest statement of what is happening can easily appear
to be an affectation

For more than ten years now, there has been an
extraordinary pressure of news — let us say, news incom-
parably more pretentious than any description of it, news,
at first, of the collapse of our system, or, call it, of life,
then of news of a new world, but of a new world so un-
certain that one did not know anything whatever of its
nature, and does not know now, and could not tell
whether it was to be all-English, all-German, all-Russian,
all-Japanese, or all-American, and cannot tell now, and
finally news of a war, which was a renewal of what, if it
was not the greatest war, became such by this continua-
tion. And for more than ten years, the consciousness of
the world has concentrated on events which have made
the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement
of people in the intervals of a storm The disclosures of

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 21

the impermanence of the past suggested, and suggest, an
impermanence of the future Little of what we have be-
lieved has been true Only the prophecies are true The
present is an opportunity to repent. This is familiar
enough The war is only a part of a war-like whole It is
not possible to look backward and to see that the same
thing was true m the past It is a question of pressure,
and pressure is incalculable and eludes the historian The
Napoleonic era is regarded as having had little or no effect
on the poets and the novelists who lived m it But Cole-
ridge and Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott and Jane
Austen did not have to put up with Napoleon and Marx
and Europe, Asia and Africa all at one time. It seems
possible to say that they knew of the events of their day
much as we know of the bombings m the interior of
China and not at all as we know of the bombings of Lon-
don, or, rather, as we should know of the bombings of
Toronto or Montreal. Another part of the war-like whole
to which we do not respond quite as we do to the news of
war is the income tax. The blanks are specimens of
mathematical prose They titillate the instinct of self-
preservation in a class m which that instinct has been for-
gotten Virginia Woolf thought that the income tax, if it
continued, would benefit poets by enlarging their vo-
cabularies and I dare say that she was right

If it is not possible to assert that the Napoleonic era
was the end of one era in the history of the imagination
and the beginning of another, one comes closer to the
truth by making that assertion in respect to the French

22 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

Revolution. The defeat or triumph of Hitler are parts of
a war-like whole but the fate of an individual is different
from the fate of a society Rightly or wrongly, we feel
that the fate of a society is involved in the orderly dis-
orders of the present time We are confronting, therefore,
a set of events, not only beyond our power to tran-
quillize them in the mind, beyond our power to reduce
them and metamorphose them, but events that stir the
emotions to violence, that engage us m what is direct
and immediate and real, and events that involve the con-
cepts and sanctions that are the order of our hves and
may involve our very lives, and these events are occur-
ring persistently with increasing omen, in what may be
called our presence. These are the things that I had in
mind when I spoke of the pressure of reality, a pressure
great enough and prolonged enough to bring about the
end of one era in the history of the imagination and, if so,
then great enough to bring about the beginning of an-
other. It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that
it is always at the end of an era What happens is that it
is always attaching itself to a new reality, and adhering
to it It is not that there is a new imagination but that there
is a new reality. The pressure of reality may, of course,
be less than the general pressure that I have described
It exists for individuals according to the circumstances
of their lives or according to the characteristics of their
minds. To sum it up, the pressure of reality is, I think,
the determining factor m the artistic character of an era
and, as well, the determining factor in the artistic char-

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 2,3

acter of an individual. The resistance to this pressure or
its evasion in the case of individuals of extraordinary im-
agination cancels the pressure so far as those individuals
are concerned

4
Suppose we try, now, to construct the figure of a poet,
a possible poet. He cannot be a charioteer traversing va-
cant space, however ethereal He must have lived all of
the last two thousand years, and longer, and he must
have instructed himself, as best he could, as he went
along. He will have thought that Virgil, Dante, Shake-
speare, Milton placed themselves in remote lands and in
remote ages, that their men and women were the dead
— and not the dead lying in the earth, but the dead still
living in their remote lands and in their remote ages, and
living in the earth or under it, or m the heavens — and he
will wonder at those huge imaginations, in which -what
is remote becomes near, and what is dead lives with an
intensity beyond any experience of life He will consider
that although he has himself witnessed, during the long
period of his life, a general transition to reality, his own
measure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of all the
lovers of the truth, is the measure of his power to ab-
stract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstrac-
tion the reality on which the lovers of truth insist He
must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract real-
ity, which he does by placing it in his imagination He
knows perfectly that he cannot be too noble a rider, that

24 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

he cannot rise up loftily in helmet and armor on a horse
of imposing bronze He will think again of Milton and of
what was said about him that "the necessity of writing
for one's living blunts the appreciation of writing when
it bears the mark of perfection Its quality disconcerts our
hasty writers, they are ready to condemn it as preciosity
and affectation And if to them the musical and creative
powers of words convey little pleasure, how out of date
and irrelevant they must find the . music of Milton 1 s
verse " Don Quixote will make it imperative for him to
make a choice, to come to a decision regarding the im-
agination and reality, and he will find that it is not a
choice of one over the other and not a decision that di-
vides them, but something subtler, a recognition that
here, too, as between these poles, the universal interde-
pendence exists, and hence his choice and his decision
must be that they are equal and inseparable To take a
single instance When Horatio says,

Now cracks a noble heart Good night, sweet -prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest I

are not the imagination and reality equal and inseparable'
Above all, he will not forget General Jackson or the pic-
ture of the Wooden Horses

I said of the picture that it was a work in which every-
thing was favorable to reality I hope that the use of that
bare word has been enough But without regard to its
range of meaning in thought, it includes all its natural
images, and its connotations are without limit. Bergson

The Nohle Rider and the Sound of Words 25

describes the visual perception of a motionless object as
the most stable of internal states He says "The object
may remain the same, I may look at it from the same
side, at the same angle, in the same light, nevertheless,
the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have
just had, even if only because the one is an instant later
than the other My memory is there, which conveys
something of the past into the present -l ' 1

Dr Joad's comment on this is "Similarly with ex-
ternal things Every body, every quality of a body re-
solves itself into an enormous number of vibrations,
movements, changes What is it that vibrates, moves, is
changed' There is no answer Philosophy has long dis-
missed the notion of substance and modern physics has
endorsed the dismissal . How, then, does the world
come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects
extended in space' Because of the intellect, which pre-
sents us with a false view of it "

The poet has his own meaning for reality, and the
painter has, and the musician has, and besides what it
means to the intelligence and to the senses, it means
something to everyone, so to speak Notwithstanding
this, the word in its general sense, which is the sense in
which I have used it, adapts itself instandy The subject-
matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static ob-
jects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the
scene that it composes, and so reality is not that external
scene but the life that is lived in it Reality is things as
they are. The general sense of the word proliferates its

26 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

special senses. It is a jungle in itself As in the case of a
jungle, everything that makes it up is pretty much of one
color First, then, there is the reality that is taken for
granted, that is latent and, on the whole, ignored It is
the comfortable American state of life of the eighties, the
nineties and the first ten years of the present century.
Next, there is the reality that has ceased to be indifferent,
the years when the Victorians had been disposed of and
intellectual minorities and social minorities began to take
their place and to convert our state of life to something
that might not be final. This much more vital reality
made the life that had preceded it look like a volume of
Ackermanns colored plates or one of Topfers books of
sketches in Switzerland. I am trying to give the feel of
it. It was the reality of twenty or thirty years ago I say
that it was a vital reality The phrase gives a false impres-
sion. It was vital in the sense of being tense, of being in-
stinct with the fatal or with what might be the fatal The
minorities began to convince us that the Victorians had
left nothing behind The Russians followed the Victo-
rians, and the Germans, in their way, followed the Rus-
sians. The British Empire, directly or indirectly, was
what was left and as to that one could not be sure
whether it was a shield or a target Reality then became
violent and so remains This much ought to be said to
make it a little clearer that in speaking of the pressure of
reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not
physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but phys-
ically violent for millions of our friends and for still more

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 2,7

millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be
said, for everyone alive.

A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting
or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree,
with the knowledge that the degree of today may become
a deadlier degree tomorrow. There is, however, no point
to dramatizing the future in advance of the fact. I con-
fine myself to the outhne of a possible poet, with only the
slightest sketch of his background.

5

Here I am, well-advanced in my paper, with every-
thing of interest that I started out to say remaining to be
said I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have
stated its nature, from one of the many points of view
from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdepend-
ence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is not
a definition, since it is incomplete. But it states the nature
of poetry. Then I am interested in the role of the poet
and this is paramount. In this area of my subject I might
be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociologi-
cal or political, obligation of the poet. He has none. That
he must be contemporaneous is as old as Longinus and
I dare say older. But that he is contemporaneous is almost
inevitable How contemporaneous in the direct sense in
which being contemporaneous is intended were the four
great poets of whom I spoke a moment ago? I do not
think that a poet owes any more as a social obligation
than he owes as a moral obligation, and if there is any-

28 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

thing concerning poetry about which people agree it is
that the role of the poet is not to be found m morals I
cannot say what that wide agreement amounts to because
the agreement (m which I do not join) that the poet is
under a social obligation is equally wide Reality is life
and life is society and the imagination and reality, that
is to say, the imagination and society are inseparable
That is pre-eminently true in the case of the poetic drama.
The poetic drama needs a terrible genius before it is any-
thing more than a literary relic Besides the theater has
forgotten that it could ever be terrible. It is not one of
the instruments of fate, decidedly. Yes- the all-command-
ing subject-matter of poetry is life, the never-ceasing
source But it is not a social obligation One does not
love and go back to ones ancient mother as a social obli-
gation One goes back out of a suasion not to be denied.
Unquestionably if a social movement moved one deeply
enough, its moving poems would follow. No politician
can command the imagination, directing it to do this or
that. Stalin might grind his teeth the whole of a Russian
winter and yet all the poets in the Soviets might remain
silent the following spring. He might excite their imagi-
nations by something he said or did. He would not com-
mand them. He is singularly free from that "cult of
pomp," which is the comic side of the European disaster,
and that means as much as anything to us. The truth is
that the social obligation so closely urged is a phase of
the pressure of reality which a poet (in the absence of
dramatic poets) is bound to resist or evade today Dante

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 2,0

in Purgatory and Paradise was still the voice of the Mid-
dle Ages but not through fulfilling any social obligation.
Since that is the role most frequently urged, if that role is
eliminated, and if a possible poet is left facing life with-
out any categorical exactions upon him, what then?
What is his function' Certainly it is not to lead people
out of the confusion in which they find themselves. Nor
is it, I think, to comfort them while they follow their
readers to and fro I think that his function is to make
his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as
he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of
others His role, in short, is to help people to live their
lives Time and time again it has been said that he may not
address himself to an elite I think he may There is not
a poet whom we prize living today that does not address
himself to an elite The poet will continue to do this : to
address himself to an elite even in a classless society, un-
less, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile.
In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone
at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with
pretence He will, nevertheless, still be addressing him-
self to an elite, for all poets address themselves to some-
one and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to
amount to an instinct, that it should be to an elite, not to
a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not
to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own,
if there are enough of one's own to fill a gallery. And that
elite, if it responds, not out of complaisance, but because
the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it

30 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

that for which it was searching in itself and in the life
around it and which it had not yet quite found, will there-
after do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is
to say, receive his poetry

I repeat that his role is to help people to live their
lives. He has had immensely to do with giving life what-
ever savor it possesses. He has had to do with whatever
the imagination and the senses have made of the world
He has, in fact, had to do with life except as the intellect
has had to do with it and, as to that, no one is needed to
tell us that poetry and philosophy are akin. I want to re-
peat for two reasons a number of observations made by
Charles Mauron. The first reason is that these observa-
tions tell us what it is that a poet does to help people to
live their lives and the second is that they prepare the
way for a word concerning escapism. They are: that the
artist transforms us into epicures; that he has to discover
the possible work of art in the real world, then to extract
it, when he does not himself compose it entirely, that he
is un amoureux perpetuel of the world that he contem-
plates and thereby enriches, that art sets out to express
the human soul; and finally that everything like a firm
grasp of reality is eliminated from the aesthetic field.
With these aphorisms in mind, how is it possible to con-
demn escapism? The poetic process is psychologically an
escapist process. The chatter about escapism is, to my
way of thinking, merely common cant My own remarks
about resisting or evading the pressure of reality mean
escapism, if analyzed Escapism has a pejorative sense,

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 31

which it cannot be supposed that I include in the sense
m which I use the word. The pejorative sense applies
where the poet is not attached to reality, where the im-
agination does not adhere to reality, which, for my part,
I regard as fundamental. If we go back to the collection
of solid, static objects extended in space, which Dr. Joad
posited, and if we say that the space is blank space, no-
where, without color, and that the objects, though solid,
have no shadows and, though static, exert a mournful
power, and, without elaborating this complete poverty,
if suddenly we hear a different and familiar description
of the place:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning, silent bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the shy,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air;

if we have this experience, we know how poets help peo-
ple to live their lives. This illustration must serve for all
the rest There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguish-
able from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say,
no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live,
since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or
was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which
we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he
gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are
unable to conceive of it.

And what about the sound of words' What about no-

32 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

bility, of which the fortunes were to be a kind of test of
the value of the poet? I do not know of anything that will
appear to have suffered more from the passage of time
than the music of poetry and that has suffered less. The
deepening need for words to express our thoughts and
feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we
shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen
to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling
them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality,
a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only
within the power of the acutest poet to give them Those
of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry,
those who understand that words are thoughts and not
only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and
women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking, must
be conscious of this that, above everything else, poetry is
words, and that words, above everything else, are, in
poetry, sounds. This being so, my time and yours might
have been better spent if I had been less interested in
trying to give our possible poet an identity and less in-
terested in trying to appoint him to his place But unless
I had done these things, it might have been thought that
I was rhetorical, when I was speaking in the simplest
way about things of such importance that nothing is
more so. A poet's words are of things that do not exist
without the words Thus, the image of the charioteer and
of the winged horses, which has been held to be precious
for all of time that matters, was created by words of
things that never existed without the words. A descrip-

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 33

tion of Verrocchio's statue could be the integration of an
illusion equal to the statue itself Poetry is a revelation in
words by means of the words Croce was not speaking of
poetry m particular when he said that language is per-
petual creation. About nobility I cannot be sure that the
decline, not to say the disappearance of nobility is any-
thing more than a maladjustment between the imagina-
tion and reality We have been a little insane about the
truth We have had an obsession In its ultimate exten-
sion, the truth about which we have been insane will
lead us to look beyond the truth to something in which
the imagination will be the dominant complement It is
not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also,
that reality adheres to the imagination and that the inter-
dependence is essential We may emerge from our has-
sesse and, if we do, how would it happen if not by the
intervention of some fortune of the mind' And what
would that fortune of the mind happen to be? It might
be only commonsense but even that, a commonsense be-
yond the truth, would be a nobihty of long descent.

The poet refuses to allow his task to be set for him.
He denies that he has a task and considers that the organ-
ization of materia poetica is a contradiction m terms. Yet
the imagination gives to everything that it touches a pe-
culiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the
imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees.
This inherent nobility is the natural source of another,
which our extremely headstrong generation regards as
false and decadent. I mean that nobility which is our

34 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

spiritual height and depth, and while I know how diffi-
cult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a
sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inacces-
sible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more
quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its defi-
nite presentations a horror of it. But there it is. The fact
that it is there is what makes it possible to invite to the
reading and writing of poetry men of intelligence and de-
sire for life I am not thinking of the ethical or the sono-
rous or at all of the manner of it. The manner of it is, in
fact, its difficulty, which each man must feel each day
differently, for himself. I am not thinking of the solemn,
the portentous or demoded. On the other hand, I am
evading a definition. If it is defined, it will be fixed and it
must not be fixed. As in the case of an external thing,
nobility resolves itself into an enormous number of vibra-
tions, movements, changes. To fix it is to put an end to
it. Let me show it to you unfixed

Late last year Epstein exhibited some of his flower
paintings at the Leicester Galleries in London. A com-
mentator in Apollo said. "How with this rage can beauty
holdaylea . . . The quotation from Shakespeare's 65th
sonnet prefaces the catalogue. ... It would be apropos
to any other flower paintings than Mr Epsteins His
make no pretence to fragility. They shout, explode all
over the picture space and generally oppose the rage of
the world with such a rage of form and colour as no
flower in nature or pigment has done since Van Gogh "

What ferocious beauty the line from Shakespeare puts

The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words 35

on when used under such circumstances' While it has its
modulation of despair, it holds its plea and its plea is
noble There is no element more conspicuously absent
from contemporary poetry than nobility. There is no ele-
ment that poets have sought after, more curiously and
more piously, certain of its obscure existence Its voice
is one of the inarticulate voices which it is their business
to overhear and to record. The nobility of rhetoric is, of
course, a lifeless nobility. Pareto's epigram that history
is a cemetery of aristocracies easily becomes another.
that poetry is a cemetery of nobilities. For the sensitive
poet, conscious of negations, nothing is more difficult
than the affirmations of nobility and yet there is nothing
that he requires of himself more persistently, since in
them and in their kind, alone, are to be found those sanc-
tions that are the reasons for his being and for that occa-
sional ecstasy, or ecstatic freedom of the mind, which is
his special privilege.

It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than no-
bility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and
ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in
our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks
false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and
we turn away from it as from something repulsive and
particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of
assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur
that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force
and not the water of which it is composed, which is never
the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations

36 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

of which it is composed, which are never the same. Pos-
sibly this description of it as a force will do more than
anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you
to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to hu-
man nature The mind has added nothing to human na-
ture. It is a violence from within that protects us from a
violence without It is the imagination pressing back
against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analy-
sis, to have something to do with our self-preservation;
and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound
of its words, helps us to live our lives.

II

The Figure of the Youth

as Virile Poet

[ 39 ]

I

t appears that what is central to philosophy is its
least valuable part. Note the three scraps that follow
First, part of a letter from Henry Bradley to Robert
Bridges, as follows

My own attitude towards all philosophies old and new, is
very sceptical Not that I despise philosophy or philos-
ophers, hut I feel that the universe of being is too vast
to he comprehended even by the greatest of the sons of
Adam. We do get., I believe, glimpses of the real prob-
lems, perhaps even of the real solutions, but when we
have formulated our questions, I fear we have always
substituted illusory problems for the real ones.

This was in reply to a letter from Bridges, in which
Bridges appears to have commented on Bergson. Then,
second, it is Bergson that Paul Valery called

peut-etre Vun des derniers hommes qui auront exclusive-
ment, profondement et superieurement pense, dans une
epoque du monde oil le monde va pensant et meditant de
moins en moms. . . . Bergson semble dqa appartenir a
un age revolu, et son nom est le dernier grand nom de
Vhistoire de Tintelhgence europeenne.

40 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

And yet, third, it is of Bergsons VEvolution Creatrice
that William James said m a letter to Bergson himself

You may be amused at the comparison, but m finishing it
I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing
Madame Bovary, such a flavor of -persistent euphony.

If these expressions speak for any considerable number
of people and, therefore, if any considerable number of
people feel this way about the truth and about what may
be called the official view of being (since philosophic
truth may be said to be the official view), we cannot ex-
pect much in respect to poetry, assuming that we define
poetry as an unofficial view of being. This is a much
larger definition of poetry than it is usual to make But
just as the nature of the truth changes, perhaps for no
more significant reason than that philosophers live and
die, so the nature of poetry changes, perhaps for no more
significant reason than that poets come and go It is so
easy to say in a universe of life and death that the reason
itself lives and dies and, if so, that the imagination lives
and dies no less.

Once on a packet on his way to Germany Coleridge
was asked to Join a party of Danes and drink with them.
He says:

I went, and found some excellent wines and a dessert of
grapes with a pine-apple The Danes had christened me
Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black, with

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 41

large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly
have -passed very well for a Methodist missionary How-
ever I disclaimed my title. What then may you be . . .
Un philosophe, perhaps? It was at that time in my life
in which of all possible names and characters I had the
greatest disgust to that of un philosophe. . . . The
Dane then informed me that all in the present party were
Philosophers likewise . . . We drank and talked and
sung, till we talked and sung altogether, and then we
rose and danced on the deck a set of dances.

As poetry goes, as the imagination goes, as the ap-
proach to truth, or, say, to being by way of the imagina-
tion goes, Coleridge is one of the great figures. Even so,
just as William James found in Bergson a persistent eu-
phony, so we find in Coleridge, dressed in black, with
large shoes and black worsted stockings, dancing on the
deck of a Hamburg packet, a man who may be said to
have been defining poetry all his life in definitions that
are valid enough but which no longer impress us pri-
marily by their validity.

To define poetry as an unofficial view of being places
it in contrast with philosophy and at the same time es-
tablishes the relationship between the two. In philosophy
we attempt to approach truth through the reason. Ob-
viously this is a statement of convenience. If we say that
m poetry we attempt to approach truth through the im-
agination, this, too, is a statement of convenience. We
must conceive of poetry as at least the equal of philos-

42 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

ophy If truth is the object of both and if any considerable
number of people feel very sceptical of all philosophers,
then, to be brief about it, a still more considerable num-
ber of people must feel very sceptical of all poets Since
we expect rational ideas to satisfy the reason and im-
aginative ideas to satisfy the imagination, it follows that
if we are sceptical of rational ideas it is because they do
not satisfy the reason and if we are sceptical of imagina-
tive ideas it is because they do not satisfy the imagina-
tion. If a rational idea does not satisfy the imagination, it
may, nevertheless, satisfy the reason If an imaginative
idea does not satisfy the reason, we regard the fact as m
the nature of things. If an imaginative idea does not sat-
isfy the imagination, our expectation of it is not fulfilled.
On the other hand, and finally, if an imaginative idea
satisfies the imagination, we are indifferent to the fact
that it does not satisfy the reason, although we concede
that it would be complete, as an idea, if, in addition to
satisfying the imagination, it also satisfied the reason
From this analysis, we deduce that an idea that satisfies
both the reason and the imagination, if it happened, for
instance, to be an idea of God, would establish a divine
beginning and end for us which, at the moment, the rea-
son, singly, at best proposes and on which, at the mo-
ment, the imagination, singly, merely meditates. This is
an illustration. It seems to be elementary, from this point
of view, that the poet, in order to fulfill himself, must ac-
complish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the
imagination. It does not follow that in the long run the

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 43

poet will find himself in the position in which the philos-
opher now finds himself. On the contrary, if the end of
the philosopher is despair, the end of the poet is fulfill-
ment, since the poet finds a sanction for life in poetry that
satisfies the imagination. Thus, poetry, which we have
been thinking of as at least the equal of philosophy, may
be its superior. Yet the area of definition is almost an
area of apologetics The look of it may change a little if
we consider not that the definition has not yet been found
but that there is none.

3

Certainly the definition has not yet been found. You
will not find it in such works as those on the art of poetry
by Aristotle and Horace. In his edition of AristouVs
work Principal Fyfe says that Aristotle did not even ap-
preciate poetry In the time of Aristotle, there was no
such word as literature in Greek. Yet today poetry is lit-
erature more often than not, for poetry partakes of what
may be called the tendency to become literature Life it-
self partakes of this tendency, which is a phase of the
growth of sophistication. Sophistication, in turn, is a
phase of the development of civilization. Aristotle under-
stood poetry to be imitation particularly of action in
drama In Chapter 6, Aristotle states the parts of tragedy,
among them thought and character, which are not to be
confused He says that character in a play is that which
reveals the moral purpose of the agents, i.e , the sort of
thing they seek or avoid — hence, there is no room for

44 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject The
annotation of the editor is this .

A man who chooses, e g., vengeance rather than safety
reveals his character by exercise of Will. A man who at
dinner chooses grouse rather than rabbit reveals nothing,
because no sane man would choose otherwise.

This sort of thing has nothing to do with poetry. With
our sense of the imaginative today, we are bound to con-
sider a language that did not contain a word for literature
as extraordinary even though the language was the lan-
guage of Plato With us it is not a paradox to say that
poetry and literature are close together Although there is
no definition of poetry, there are impressions, approxima-
tions. Shelley gives us an approximation when he gives
us a definition in what he calls "a general sense " He
speaks of poetry as created by "that imperial faculty
whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of
man. 11 He says that a poem is the very image of life ex-
pressed in its eternal truth. It is "indeed something di-
vine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowl-
edge ... the record of the best and happiest moments
of the happiest and best minds ... it arrests the van-
ishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life. 11
In spite of the absence of a definition and m spite of the
impressions and approximations we are never at a loss
to recogmze poetry As a consequence it is easy for us to
propose a center of poetry, a vis or noeud vital, to which,
in the absence of a definition, all the variations of defini-

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 45

tion are peripheral Sometimes we think that a psychol-
ogy of poetry has found its way to the center We say
that poetry is metamorphosis and we come to see in a
few lines descriptive of an eye, a hand, a stick, the
essence of the matter, and we see it so definitely that we
say that if the philosopher comes to nothing because he
fails, the poet may come to nothing because he succeeds.
The philosopher fails to discover. Suppose the poet dis-
covered and had the power thereafter at will and by in-
telligence to reconstruct us by his transformations He
would also have the power to destroy us If there was,
or if we believed that there was, a center, it would be
absurd to fear or to avoid its discovery.

Since we have no difficulty in recognizing poetry and
since, at the same time, we say that it is not an attainable
acme, not some breath from an altitude, not something
that awaits discovery, after which it will not be subject
to chance, we may be accounting for it if we say that it
is a process of the personality of the poet One does not
have to be a cardinal to make the point To say that it is
a process of the personality of the poet does not mean that
it involves the poet as subject Aristotle said: "The poet
should say very little in propria persona " Without stop-
ping to discuss what might be discussed for so long, note
that the principle so stated by Aristotle is cited in relation
to the point that poetry is a process of the personality of
the poet. This is the element, the force, that keeps poetry
a living thing, the modernizing and ever-modern in-
fluence. The statement that the process does not involve

46 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true,
precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without in-
direct egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no
poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite
simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found
and why, in short, there is none In one of the really re-
markable books of the day, The Life of Forms in Art,
Henri Focillon says:

Human consciousness is in perpetual pursuit of a lan-
guage and a style To assume consciousness is at once to
assume form Even at levels far below the zone of defini-
tion and clarity, forms, measures and relationships exist
The chief characteristic of the mind is to he constantly
describing itself.

This activity is indirect egotism. The mind of the poet
describes itself as constantly in his poems as the mind of
the sculptor describes itself in his forms, or as the mind
of Cezanne described itself in his "psychological land-
scapes." We are talking about something a good deal
more comprehensive than the temperament of the artist
as that is usually spoken of We are concerned with the
whole personality and, in effect, we are saying that the
poet who writes the heroic poem that will satisfy all there
is of us and all of us in time to come, will accomplish it by
the power of his reason, the force of his imagination and,
in addition, the effortless and inescapable process of his
own individuality.

It was of the temperament of the artist that Cezanne

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 47

spoke so frequently in his letters, and while we mean
something more, so, it seems, did Cezanne He said:

Primary force alone, id est temperament, can bring a per-
son to the end he must attain.

Again:

With a small temperament one can he very much of a
painter. It is sufficient to have a sense of art. . . .
Therefore institutions, pensions, honours can only be
made for cretins, rogues and rascals.

And again, this time to Emile Bernard:

Your letters are precious to me . . . because their ar-
rival lifts me out of the monotony which is caused by the
incessant . . . search for the sole and unique aim. . . .
I am able to describe to you again . . . the realization of
that part of nature which, coming into our line of vision,
gives the picture. Now the theme to develop is that —
whatever our temperament or power in the presence of
nature may be — we must render the image of what we
see.

And, finally, to his son:

Obviously one must succeed in feeling for oneself and in
expressing oneself sufficiently.

4
An attempt has been made to equate poetry with phi-
losophy, and to do this with an indication of the possibil-

48 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

ity that an advantage, in the long run, may lie with po-
etry, and yet it has been said that poetry is personal If
it is personal in a pejorative sense its value is slight and
it is not the equal of philosophy. What we have under
observation, however, is the creative process, the per-
sonality of the poet, his individuality, as an element in
the creative process; and by process of the personality of
the poet we mean, to select what may seem to be a curi-
ous particular, the incidence of the nervous sensitiveness
of the poet in the act of creating the poem and, generally
speaking, the physical and mental factors that condition
him as an individual If a man's nerves shrink from loud
sounds, they are quite likely to shrink from strong colors
and he will be found preferring a drizzle in Venice to a
hard rain in Hartford Everything is of a piece If he com-
poses music it will be music agreeable to his own nerves.
Yet it is commonly thought that the artist is independent
of his work. In his chapter on u Forms in the Realm of
the Mmd," M Focillon speaks of a vocation of sub-
stances, or technical destiny, to which there is a corre-
sponding vocation of minds; that is to say, a certain order
of forms corresponds to a certain order of minds These
things imply an element of change Thus a vocation rec-
ognizes its material by foresight, before experience As
an example of this, he refers to the first state of the Pri-
sons of Piranesi as skeletal But "twenty years later,
Piranesi returned to these etchings, and on taking them
up again, he poured into them shadow after shadow, until
one might say that he excavated this astonishing dark-

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 49

ness not from the brazen plates, but from the living rock
of some subterranean world " The way a poet feels when
he is writing, or after he has written, a poem that com-
pletely accomplishes his purpose is evidence of the per-
sonal nature of his activity. To describe it by exaggerating
it, he shares the transformation, not to say apotheosis,
accomplished by the poem. It must be this experience
that makes him think of poetry as possibly a phase of
metaphysics, and it must be this experience that teases
him with that sense of the possibility of a remote, a
mystical vis or noeud vital to which reference has already
been made. In The Two Sources of Morality and Re-
ligion, Bergson speaks of the morality of aspiration It
implicitly contains, he says,

the feeling of "progress The emotion . . . is the enthu-
siasm of a forward movement. . . . But antecedent to
this metaphysical theory . . . are the simpler represen-
tations ... 0/ the founders of religion, the mystics and
the saints . . . They begin by saying that what they
experience is a feeling of liberation . . .

The feeling is not a feeling peculiar to exquisite or (per-
haps, as better) precise realization, and hence confined
to poets who exceed us in nature as they do m speech.
There is nothing rare about it although it may extend to
degrees of rarity. On the contrary, just as Bergson refers
to the simpler representations of aspiration occurring in
the lives of the saints, so we may refer to the simpler rep-
resentations of an aspiration (not the same, yet not

50 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

wholly unlike) occurring in the lives of those who have
Just written their first essential poems. After all, the
young man or young woman who has written a few
poems and who wants to read them is merely the voluble
convert or the person looking in a mirror who sees sud-
denly the traces of an unexpected genealogy. We are in-
terested in this transformation primarily on the part of
the poet. Yet it is a thing that communicates itself to the
reader. Anyone who has read a long poem day after day
as, for example, The Faerie Queene, knows how the
poem comes to possess the reader and how it naturalizes
him in its own imagination and liberates him there

This sense of liberation may be examined specifically
in relation to the experience of writing a poem that com-
pletely accomplishes the purpose of the poet Bergson had
in mmd religious aspiration The poet who experiences
what was once called inspiration experiences both aspira-
tion and inspiration But that is not a difference, for it is
clear that Bergson intended to include in aspiration not
only desire but the fulfillment of desire, not only the peti-
tion but the harmonious decree What is true of the ex-
perience of the poet is no doubt true of the experience of
the painter, of the musician and of any artist If, then,
when we speak of liberation, we mean an exodus, if
when we speak of justification, we mean a kind of justice
of which we had not known and on which we had not
counted, if when we experience a sense of purification,
we can think of the establishing of a self, it is certain that
the experience of the poet is of no less a degree than the

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 51

experience of the mystic and we may be certain that in
the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences
are of no less a degree than the experiences of the saints
themselves It is a question of the nature of the experi-
ence It is not a question of identifying or relating dissim-
ilar figures, that is to say, it is not a question of making
saints out of poets or poets out of saints

In this state of elevation we feel perfectly adapted to
the idea that moves and Toiseau qui chante The identity
of the feeling is subject to discussion and, from this, it
follows that its value is debatable. It may be dismissed,
on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction;
and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God
is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea,
and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry
not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the
feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched,
of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that
the truth may set them free — if we say these things and
if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and
placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the
poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that com-
pletely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed,
whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial
robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering
the hymns of joy that followed his creation This may be
a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter But perhaps
that remark is true of many of the more prodigious things
of life and death

CJ2 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

5

The centuries have a way of being male Without pre-
tending to say whether they get this character from their
good heroes or their bad ones, it is certain that they get
it, in part, from their philosophers and poets It is curious,
looking back at them, to see how much of the impression
that they leave has been derived from the progress of
thought in their time and from the abundance of the arts,
including poetry, left behind and how little of it comes
from prouder and much noisier things Thus, when we
think of the seventeenth century, it is to be remarked
how much of the strength of its appearance is associated
with the idea that this was a time when the incredible
suffered most at the hands of the credible We think of it
as a period of hard thinking. We have only their records
and memories by which to recall such eras, not the sight
and sound of those that lived in them preserved in an
eternity of dust and dirt When we look back at the face
of the seventeenth century, it is at the rigorous face of
the rigorous thinker and, say, the Miltonic image of a
poet, severe and determined. In effect, what we are
remembering is the rather haggard background of the
incredible, the imagination without intelligence, from
which a younger figure is emerging, stepping forward in
the company of a muse of its own, still half-beast and
somehow more than human, a kind of sister of the Mino-
taur. This younger figure is the intelligence that endures.
It is the imagination of the son still bearing the antique

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 53

imagination of the father It is the clear intelligence of
the young man still bearing the burden of the obscurities
of the intelligence of the old It is the spirit out of its own
self, not out of some surrounding myth, delineating with
accurate speech the complications of which it is com-
posed For this Aeneas, it is the past that is Anchises

The incredible is not a part of poetic truth. On the
contrary, what concerns us in poetry, as m everything
else, is the belief of credible people in credible things. It
follows that poetic truth is the truth of credible things,
not so much that it is actually so, as that it must be so.
It is toward that alone that it is possible for the intelli-
gence to move. In one of his letters, Xavier Doudan says*
u lZ y a longtemps que je pense que celui qui 71 await que
des idees claixes serait assurement un sot " The reply to
this is that it is impossible to conceive of a man who has
nothing but clear ideas, for our nature is an illimitable
space through which the intelligence moves without com-
ing to an end. The incredible is inexhaustible but, fortu-
nately, it is not always the same. We come, m this way,
to understand that the moment of exaltation that the poet
experiences when he writes a poem that completely ac-
complishes his purpose, is a moment of victory over the
incredible, a moment of purity that does not become any
the less pure because, as what was incredible is elimi-
nated, something newly credible takes its place As we
come to the point at which it is necessary to be explicit
in respect to poetic truth, note that, if we say that the
philosopher pursues the truth in one way and the poet in

54 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

another, it is implied that both are pursuing the same
thing, and we overlook the fact that they are pursuing
two different parts of a whole. It is as if we said that
the end of logic, mathematics, physics, reason and imagi-
nation is all one. In short, it is as if we said that there is
no difference between philosophic truth and poetic truth.
There is a difference between them and it is the difference
between logical and empirical knowledge. Since philoso-
phers do not agree in respect to what constitutes philo-
sophic truth, as Bertrand Russell (if any illustration
whatever is necessary) demonstrates in his Inquiry into
Meaning and Truth, even in the casual comment that
truth as a static concept is to be discarded, it may not be
of much use to improvise a definition of poetic truth.
Nevertheless, it may be said that poetic truth is an agree-
ment with reality, brought about by the imagination of a
man disposed to be strongly influenced by his imagina-
tion, which he believes, for a time, to be true, expressed
in terms of his emotions or, since it is less of a restriction
to say so, in terms of his own personality. And so stated,
the difference between philosophic truth and poetic truth
appears to become final. As to the definition itself, it is
an expedient for getting on. We shall come back to the
nature of poetic truth very shortly.

In the most propitious climate and in the midst of life's
virtues, the simple figure of the youth as virile poet is
always surrounded by a cloud of double characters,
against whose thought and speech it is imperative that
he should remain on constant guard. These are the poetic

The Figure of the Youth as Vmle Poet 55

philosophers and the philosophical poets. Mme de Stael
said "Nos meilleurs poetes lyriqu.es, en France, ce sont
peut-etre nos grands prosateurs, Bossuet, Pascal, Fene-
lon, Buffon, Jean-Jacques. . . ." M. Claudel added Ra-
belais, Chateaubriand, even Balzac, and when he did so,
M Rene Fernandat said "On remarquera que M
Claudel a supprime les ''peut-etre'' de Mme. de Stael " In
English the poetic aspect of Bunyan is quite commonly-
recognized This is an occasion to call attention to Wil-
liam Penn as an English poet, although he may never
have written a line of verse But the illustration of Des-
cartes is irresistible To speak of figures like Descartes as
double characters is an inconceivable difficulty. In his
exegesis of The Discourse on Method, Leon Roth says

His vision showed him first the " dictionary, ^ then the
"poets,"''' and only afterwards the est et non, and his "ra-
tionalism,' 1 '' like the "anti-rationalism' 1 '' of Pascal, was the
product of a struggle not always completely successful.
What less "rationalistic' 1 could there be than the early
thought preserved by Baillet from the Olympica (one
may note in passing the poetical names of all these early
works) • "There are sentences in the writings of the poets
more serious than in those of the philosophers. . . .
There are in us, as in a flint, seeds of knowledge Philos-
ophers adduce them through the reason; poets strike them
out from the imagination, and these are the brighter.'"
It was the "rationalist 1 " 1 Voltaire who first called atten-
tion to the "poetic" 1 in Descartes. . . . To the casual

56 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

reader there is nothing more remarkable than the care-
less richness of his style It is full of similes drawn not
only from the arts, like architecture, painting and the
stage, but also from the familiar scenes of ordinary and
country life. . . . And this not only in his early writing
It is ay-parent even in his latest published work, the sci-
entific analysis of the ''''passions of the soul," and it was
Voltaire again who commented first on the fact that the
last thing from his pen was a ballet written for the Queen
of Sweden

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists The
poet merely enjoys existence The philosopher thinks of
the world as an enormous pastiche or, as he puts it, the
world is as the percipient. Thus Kant says that the ob-
jects of perception are conditioned by the nature of the
mind as to their form But the poet says that, whatever
it may be, la vie est plus belle que les idees One needs
hardly to be told that men more or less irrational are only
more or less rational, so that it was not surprising to find
Raymond Mortimer saying m the New Statesman that
the "thoughts" of Shakespeare or Raleigh or Spenser
were in fact only contemporary commonplaces and that
it was a Victorian habit to praise poets as thinkers, since
their "thoughts are usually borrowed or confused." But
do we come away from Shakespeare with the sense that
we have been reading contemporary commonplaces?
Long ago, Sarah Bernhardt was playing Hamlet When
she came to the soliloquy "To be or not to be," she half

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 57

turned her back on the audience and slowly weaving one
hand in a small circle above her head and regarding it,
she said, with deliberation and as from the depths of a
hallucination.

Wetre ou ne pas d'etre, cest la la question . . .

and one followed her, lost in the intricate metamorphosis
of thoughts that passed through the mind with a gallan-
try, an accuracy of abundance, a crowding and pressing
of direction, which, for thoughts that were both borrowed
and confused, cancelled the borrowing and obliterated the
confusion

There is a life apart from politics It is this life that the
youth as virile poet lives, in a kind of radiant and pro-
ductive atmosphere It is the life of that atmosphere
There the philosopher is an alien The pleasure that the
poet has there is a pleasure of agreement with the radi-
ant and productive world m which he lives It is an
agreement that Mallarme found in the sound of

he vierge, le vivace et le bel au]oura"hui

and that Hopkins found in the color of

The thunder-purple seabeach plumed purple-of -thunder.

The indirect purpose or, perhaps, it would be better to
say, inverted effect of soliloquies in hell and of most ce-
lestial poems and, m a general sense, of all music played
on the terraces of the audiences of the moon, seems to
be to produce an agreement with reality It is the mundo

58 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

of the imagination in which the imaginative man delights
and not the gaunt world of the reason The pleasure is
the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be
arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recog-
nizes by sensation The morality of the poet's radiant and
productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sen-
sation.

I have compared poetry and philosophy, I have made
a point of the degree to which poetry is personal, both in
its origin and in its end, and have spoken of the typical
exhilaration that appears to be inseparable from genuine
poetic activity, I have said that the general progress from
the incredible to the credible was a progress in which
poetry has participated; I have improvised a definition of
poetic truth and have spoken of the integrity and pecu-
liarity of the poetic character Summed up, our position
at the moment is that the poet must get rid of the hieratic
in everything that concerns him and must move con-
stantly in the direction of the credible He must create his
unreal out of what is real.

If we consider the nature of our experience when we
are in agreement with reality, we find, for one thing, that
we cease to be metaphysicians. William James said:

Most of them [i e , metaphysicians] have been invalids.
I am one, cant sleep, cant make a decision, cant buy a
horse, cant do anything that befits a man, and yet you

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 59

say from my photograph that I must be a second General
Sherman., only greater and better! All right 1 I love you
for the fond delusion.

For all the reasons stated by William James, and for
many more, and in spite of M. Jacques Maritain, we do
not want to be metaphysicians. In the crowd around the
simple figure of the youth as virile poet, there are meta-
physicians, among the others And having ceased to be
metaphysicians, even though we have acquired some-
thing from them as from all men, and standing in the ra-
diant and productive atmosphere, and examining first one
detail of that world, one particular, and then another, as
we find them by chance, and observing many things that
seem to be poetry without any intervention on our part,
as, for example, the blue sky, and noting, in any case,
that the imagination never brings anything into the world
but that, on the contrary, like the personality of the poet
in the act of creating, it is no more than a process, and
desiring with all the power of our desire not to write
falsely, do we not begin to think of the possibility that
poetry is only reality, after all, and that poetic truth is a
factual truth, seen, it may be, by those whose range in
the perception of fact — that is, whose sensibility — is
greater than our own? From that point of view, the truth
that we experience when we are in agreement with real-
ity is the truth of fact. In consequence, when men, baf-
fled by philosophic truth, turn to poetic truth, they return
to their starting-point, they return to fact, not, it ought to

(5o THE NECESSARY ANGEL

be clear, to bare fact (or call it absolute fact), but to fact
possibly beyond their perception in the first instance and
outside the normal range of their sensibility What we
have called elevation and elation on the part of the poet,
which he communicates to the reader, may be not so
much elevation as an incandescence of the intelligence
and so more than ever a triumph over the incredible Here
as part of the purification that all of us undergo as we ap-
proach any central purity, and that we feel in its pres-
ence, we can say:

No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse,
sister of the Minotaur This is another of the monsters I
had for nurse, whom I have wasted I am myself a part
of what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength
of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall

These words may very well be an inscription above the
portal to what lies ahead But if poetic truth means fact
and if fact includes the whole of it as it is between the
extreme poles of sensibility, we are talking about a thing
as extensible as it is ambiguous We have excluded abso-
lute fact as an element of poetic truth But this has been
done arbitrarily and with a sense of absolute fact as fact
destitute of any imaginative aspect whatever Unhappily
the more destitute it becomes the more it begins to be
precious We must limit ourselves to saying that there are
so many things which, as they are, and without any in-
tervention of the imagination, seem to be imaginative ob-
jects that it is no doubt true that absolute fact includes

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 61

everything that the imagination includes This is our in-
timidating thesis

One sees demonstrations of this eveiy where For ex-
ample, if we close our eyes and think of a place where it
would be pleasant to spend a holiday, and if there slide
across the black eyes, like a setting on a stage, a rock
that sparkles, a blue sea that lashes, and hemlocks in
which the sun can merely fumble, this inevitably demon-
strates, since the rock and sea, the wood and sun are
those that have been familiar to us in Maine, that much
of the world of fact is the equivalent of the world of the
imagination, because it looks like it Here we are on the
border of the question of the relationship of the imagina-
tion and memory, which we avoid. It is important to be-
lieve that the visible is the equivalent of the invisible,
and once we believe it, we have destroyed the imagina-
tion, that is to say, we have destroyed the false imagina-
tion, the false conception of the imagination as some in-
calculable votes within us, unhappy Rodomontade. One
is often tempted to say that the best definition of poetry
is that poetry is the sum of its attributes So, here, we
may say that the best definition of true imagination is that
it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art.
The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable
resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment
it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and
thinking of the relationship between objects and light,
no further demonstration would be necessary Like light,
it adds nothing, except itself What light requires a day

6a THE NECESSARY ANGEL

to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of
time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It
colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents
languages, crushes men and, for that matter, gods in its
hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say,
it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact
and while it does these things, and more, it makes sure
that

. . . la mandoline jase,
Parmi les frissons de brise.

Having identified poetic truth as the truth of fact, since
fact includes poetic fact, that is to say the indefinite
number of actual things that are indistinguishable from
objects of the imagination, and having, as we hope,
washed the imagination clean, we may now return, once
again, to the figure of the youth as virile poet and join
him, or try to do so, in coming to the decision, on which,
for him and for us, too, so much depends At what level
of the truth shall he compose his poems? That is the ques-
tion on which he is reflecting, as he sits in the radiant
and productive atmosphere, which is his life, surrounded
not only by double characters and metaphysicians, but by
many men and many kinds of men, by many women and
many children and many kinds of women and of children.
The question concerns the function of the poet today and
tomorrow, but makes no pretence beyond. He is able to
read the inscription on the portal and he repeats:

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 63

I am myself a part of what is real and it is my own
speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever
shall

He says, so that we can all hear him-

I am the truth, since I am -part of what is real, but
neither more nor less than those around me And I am
imagination, m a leaden time and in a world that does not
move for the weight of its own heaviness

Can there be the slightest doubt what the decision will
be ? Can we suppose for a moment that he will be con-
tent merely to make notes, merely to copy Katahdin,
when, with his sense of the heaviness of the world, he
feels his own power to lift, or help to lift, that heaviness
away 5 Can we think that he will elect anything except
to exercise his power to the full and at its height, mean-
ing by this as part of what is real, to rely on his imagina-
tion, to make his own imagination that of those who have
none, or little 5

And how will he do this? It is not possible to say how
an imaginative person will do a thing Having made an
election, he will be faithful to the election that he has
made Having elected to exercise his power to the full
and at its height, and having identified his power as the
power of the imagination, he may begin its exercise by
studying it in exercise and proceed little by little, as he
becomes his own master, to those violences which are

64 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

the maturity of his desires. The character of the crisis
through which we are passing today, the reason why we
live in a leaden time, was summed up in a note on Klaus
Mann's recent book on Gide, as follows

The main -problem which Gide tries to solve — the crisis
of our time — is the reconciliation of the inalienable rights
of the individual to -personal development and the neces-
sity for the diminution of the misery of the masses.

When the poet has converted this into his own terms the
figure of the youth as virile poet and the community
growing day by day more and more colossal, the con-
sciousness of his function, if he is a serious artist, is a
measure of his obligation And so is the consciousness of
his history. In the Reflections on History of Jakob Burck-
hardt, there are some pages of notes on the historical con-
sideration of poetry. Burckhardt thought (citing Scho-
penhauer and Aristotle) that poetry achieves more for
the knowledge of human nature than history Burckhardt
considers the status of poetry at various epochs, among
various peoples and classes, asking each time who is sing-
ing or writing, and for whom Poetry is the voice of re-
ligion, prophecy, mythology, history, national life and
inexplicably, for him, of literature. He says*

It is a matter for great surprise that Virgil, m those cir-
cumstances, could occupy his high rank, could dominate
all the age which followed and become a mythical figure
How infinitely great are the gradations of existence from
the epic rhapsodist to the novelist of today!

The Figure of the Youth as Vvnle Poet 6$

This was written seventy-five years ago The present
generation of poets is not accustomed to measure itself
by obligations of such weight nor to thmk of itself as
Burckhardt seems to have thought of epic bards or, to
choose another example at random, of the writers of
hymns, for he speaks of "the Protestant hymn as the su-
preme religious expression, especially of the seventeenth
century."

The poet reflecting on his course, which is the same
thing as a reflection by him and by us, on the course of
poetry, will decide to do as the imagination bids, because
he has no choice, if he is to remain a poet Poetry is the
imagination of life A poem is a particular of life thought
of for so long that one's thought has become an insepara-
ble part of it or a particular of life so intensely felt that
the feeling has entered into it When, therefore, we say
that the world is a compact of real things so like the un-
real things of the imagination that they are indistinguish-
able from one another and when, by way of illustration,
we cite, say, the blue sky, we can be sure that the thing
cited is always something that, whether by thinking or
feeling, has become a part of our vital experience of life,
even though we are not aware of it. It is easy to suppose
that few people realize on that occasion, which comes to
all of us, when we look at the blue sky for the first time,
that is to say not merely see it, but look at it and experi-
ence it and for the first time have a sense that we live in
the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be
intolerable except for the non-geography that exists there

66 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

—few people realize that they are looking at the world
of their own thoughts and the world of their own feel-
ings On that occasion, the blue sky is a particular of life
that we have thought of often, even though uncon-
sciously, and that we have felt intensely in those crystalli-
zations of freshness that we no more remember than we
remember this or that gust of wind in spring or autumn.
The experiences of thinking and feeling accumulate par-
ticularly in the abnormal ranges of sensibility, so that, to
use a bit of M Focillons personal language, while the
"normative type 11 of poet is likely to be concerned with
pretty much the same facts as those with which the gen-
ius, or, rather, the youth as virile poet, is concerned, the
genius, because of the abnormal ranges of his sensibility,
not only accumulates experiences with greater rapidity,
but accumulates experiences and qualities of experience
accessible only in the extreme ranges of sensibility.

But genius is not our concern We are trying to define
what we mean by the imagination of life, and, in addi-
tion, by that special illumination, special abundance and
severity of abundance, virtue in the midst of indulgence
and order in disorder that is involved in the idea of viril-
ity We have been referring constantly to the simple
figure of the youth, in his character of poet, as virile poet.
The reason for this is that if, for the poet, the imagination
is paramount, and if he dwells apart in his imagination,
as the philosopher dwells in his reason, and as the priest
dwells in his belief , the masculine nature that we propose
for one that must be the master of our lives will be lost

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet 67

as, for example, in the folds of the garments of the ghost
or ghosts of Aristotle. As we say these things, there be-
gins to develop, in addition to the figure that has been
seated m our midst, composed, m the radiant and produc-
tive atmosphere with which we have surrounded him, an
intimation of what he is thinking as he reflects on the im-
agination of life, determined to be its master and ours
He is thinking of those facts of experience of which all of
us have thought and which all of us have felt with such,
intensity, and he says:

Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask,
although I am part of what is real, hear me and recognize
me as part of the unreal I am the truth but the truth of
that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion
and manner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in
which your words are mine, mine yours.

Ill

Three Academic Pieces

[?i ]

T

__I_H

.he accuracy of accurate letters is an accuracy
with respect to the structure of reality.

Thus, if we desire to formulate an accurate theory of
poetry, we find it necessary to examine the structure of
reality, because reality is the central reference for poetry.
By way of accomplishing this, suppose we examine one
of the significant components of the structure of reality —
that is to say, the resemblance between things.

First, then, as to the resemblance between things in
nature, it should be observed that resemblance consti-
tutes a relation between them since, in some sense, all
things resemble each other. Take, for example, a beach
extending as far as the eye can reach, bordered, on the
one hand, by trees and, on the other, by the sea. The sky
is cloudless and the sun is red In what sense do the ob-
jects in this scene resemble each other? There is enough
green in the sea to relate it to the palms. There is enough
of the sky reflected in the water to create a resemblance,
in some sense, between them The sand is yellow be-
tween the green and the blue. In short, the light alone
creates a unity not only in the recedings of distance,
where differences become invisible, but also in the con-
tacts of closer sight. So, too, sufficiently generalized, each

72 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

man resembles all other men, each woman resembles all
other women, this year resembles last year The begin-
ning of time will, no doubt, resemble the end of time
One world is said to resemble another.

A moment ago the resemblance between things was
spoken of as one of the significant components of the
structure of reality It is significant because it creates the
relation just described. It binds together It is the base of
appearance In nature, however, the relation is between
two or more of the parts of reality. In metaphor (and
this word is used as a symbol for the single aspect of
poetry with which we are now concerned — that is to say,
the creation of resemblance by the imagination, even
though metamorphosis might be a better word) — in met-
aphor, the resemblance may be, first, between two or
more parts of reality, second, between something real
and something imagined or, what is the same thing, be-
tween something imagined and something real as, for
example, between music and whatever may be evoked
by it; and, third, between two imagined things as when
we say that God is good, since the statement involves a
resemblance between two concepts, a concept of God
and a concept of goodness.

We are not dealing with identity. Both in nature and
in metaphor identity is the vanishing-point of resem-
blance. After all, if a mans exact double entered a room,
seated himself and spoke the words that were in the
mans mind, it would remain a resemblance James
Wardrop, in Signature, said recently.

Three Academic Pieces 73

The business of the press is to furnish an indefinite pub-
lic with a potentially indefinite number of identical texts.

Nature is not mechanical to that extent for all its morn-
ings and evenings, for all its inhabitants of China or
India or Russia, for all its waves, or its leaves, or its
hands Its prodigy is not identity but resemblance and
its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but
an incessant creation Because this is so in nature, it is
so m metaphor

Nor are we dealing with imitation The difference
between imitation and resemblance is a nicety. An imi-
tation may be described as an identity manque. It is arti-
ficial It is not fortuitous as a true metaphor is If it is
an imitation of something in nature, it may even surpass
identity and assume a praeter-nature It may very well
escape the derogatory. If it is an imitation of something
in metaphor, it is lifeless and that, finally, is what is
wrong with it Resemblance in metaphor is an activity
of the imagination; and in metaphor the imagination is
life In Chinese metaphor, there is a group of subjects
to which poets used to address themselves, just as early
Western painters and etchers used to address themselves
to such a subject as the Virgin crowned by Angels The
variations in these themes were not imitations, nor iden-
tities, but resemblances.

In reality, there is a level of resemblance, which is the
level of nature In metaphor, there is no such level. If
there were it would be the level of resemblance of the 1m-

74 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

agination, which has no such level. If, to our surprise, we
should meet a monsieur who told us that he was from
another world, and if he had in fact all the indicia of di-
vinity, the luminous body, the nimbus, the heraldic stig-
mata, we should recognize him as above the level of na-
ture but not as above the level of the imagination. So,
too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these mo-
rons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folk-
lore of the world of the radio— remarks made without
using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like
the spoutings of small whales — we should recognize him
as below the level of nature but not as below the level of
the imagination It is not, however, a question of above
or below but simply of beyond. Level is an abbreviated
form of level of resemblance. The statement that the im-
agination has no level of resemblance is not to be taken
as a statement that the imagination itself has no limits
The imagination is deceptive in this respect. There is
a limit to its power to surpass resemblance and that limit
is to be found in nature. The imagination is able to ma-
nipulate nature as by creating three legs and five arms
but it is not able to create a totally new nature as, for
instance, a new element with creatures indigenous
thereto, their costumes and cuisines Any discussion of
level is a discussion of balance as well. Thus, a false ex-
aggeration is a disturbing of the balance between reality
and the imagination.

Resemblances between one object and another as be-
tween one brick and another, one egg and another, are

Three Academic Pieces 75

elementary. There are many objects which in respect to
what they suggest resemble other objects and we may
include here, as objects, people. Thus, in addition to the
fact that one man resembles all other men, something
about one man may make him resemble some other par-
ticular man and this is true even when the something
about him is detached from him, as his wig. The wig of
a particular man reminds us of some other particular
man and resembles him. A strand of a child's hair brings
back the whole child and in that way resembles the child.
There must be vast numbers of things within this cate-
gory. Apparently objects of sentiment most easily prove
the existence of this kind of resemblance: something in
a locket, one's grandfathers high beaver hat, one's grand-
mother's hand- woven blankets. One may find intimations
of immortality in an object on the mantelpiece; and these
intimations are as real in the mind in which they occur
as the mantelpiece itself. Even if they are only a part of
an adult make-believe, the whole point is that the struc-
ture of reality because of the range of resemblances that
it contains is measurably an adult make-believe Per-
haps the whole field of connotation is based on resem-
blance. Perhaps resemblance which seems to be related
so closely to the imagination is related even more closely
to the intelligence, of which perceptions of resemblance
are effortless accelerations.

What has just been said shows that there are private
resemblances. The resemblance of the baby's shoes to
the baby, by suggestion, is likely to be a resemblance

j6 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

that exists for one or two alone A public resemblance,
by contrast, like the resemblance of the profile of a moun-
tain to the profile of General Washington, exists for that
great class of people who co-exist with the great ferns m
public gardens, amplified music and minor education.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but
one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these
meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
It quite seems as if there is an activity that makes one
thing resemble another (possibly as a phase of the police
power of conformity). What the eye beholds may be
the text of life It is, nevertheless, a text that we do not
write The eye does not beget in resemblance It sees
But the mind begets in resemblance as the painter begets
in representation; that is to say, as the painter makes his
world within a world, or as the musician begets in music,
in the obvious small pieces having to do with gardens in
the rain or the fountains of Rome and m the obvious
larger pieces having to do with the sea, Brazilian night
or those woods in the neighborhood of Vienna in which
the hunter was accustomed to blow his horn and in
which, also, yesterday, the birds sang preludes to the
atom bomb. It is not difficult, having once predicated
such an activity, to attribute it to a desire for resem-
blance What a ghastly situation it would be if the world
of the dead was actually different from the world of the
living and, if as life ends, instead of passing to a former
Victorian sphere, we passed into a land in which none
of our problems had been solved, after all, and nothing

Three Academic Pieces 77

resembled anything we have ever known and nothing
resembled anything else in shape, in color, in sound, in
look or otherwise. To say farewell to our generation and
to look forward to a continuation in a Jerusalem of puie
surrealism would account for the taste for oblivion.

The study of the activity of resemblance is an ap-
proach to the understanding of poetry. Poetry is a satisfy-
ing of the desire for resemblance. As the mere satisfying
of a desire, it is pleasurable But poetry if it did nothing
but satisfy a desire would not rise above the level of
many lesser things. Its singularity is that in the act of
satisfying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense
of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it,
intensifies it If resemblance is described as a partial simi-
larity between two dissimilar things, it complements and
reinforces that which the two dissimilar things have in
common It makes it brilliant When the similarity is be-
tween things of adequate dignity, the resemblance may be
said to transfigure or to sublimate them Take, for ex-
ample, the resemblance between reality and any projec-
tion of it in belief or in metaphor. What is it that these
two have in common? Is not the glory of the idea of any
future state a relation between a present and a future
glory' The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of every
paradise. However, not all poetry attempts such gran-
diose transfiguration Everyone can call to mind a variety
of figures and see clearly how these resemblances please
and why; how inevitably they heighten our sense of real-
ity. The images in Ecclesiastes

78 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

Or ever
the silver cord be loosed., or the golden bowl be broken,
ot the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the -wheel
broken at the cistern —

these images are not the language of reality, they are the
symbolic language of metamorphosis, or resemblance, of
poetry, but they relate to reality and they intensify our
sense of it and they give us the pleasure of "lentor and
solemnity" in respect to the most commonplace objects
These images have a special interest, as a group of im-
ages in harmony with each other In both prose and po-
etry, images come willingly but, usually, although there
is a relation between the subject of the images there is no
relation between the images themselves A group of im-
ages in harmony with each other would constitute a poem
within, or above, a poem. The suggestion sounds euphu-
lstic. If the desire for resemblance is the desire to enjoy
reality, it may be no less true that the desire to enjoy
reality, an acute enough desire today, is the desire for
elegance Euphuism had its origin in the desire for ele-
gance and it was euphuism that was a reason in the sun
for metaphor A school of literary ascetics denying itself
any indulgence in resemblances would, necessarily, fall
back on reality and vent all its relish there The meta-
phorical school, in the end, does the same thing

The proliferation of resemblances extends an object
The point at which this process begins, or rather at
which this growth begins, is the point at "which am-

Three Academic Pieces 79

biguity has been reached. The ambiguity that is so fa-
vorable to the poetic mind is precisely the ambiguity
favorable to resemblance In this ambiguity, the inten-
sification of reality by resemblance increases realization
and this increased realization is pleasurable. It is as if a
man who lived indoors should go outdoors on a day of
sympathetic weather His realization of the weather
would exceed that of a man who lives outdoors. It might,
in fact, be intense enough to convert the real world about
him into an imagined world. In short, a sense of reality
keen enough to be in excess of the normal sense of
reality creates a reality of its own. Here what matters
is that the intensification of the sense of reality creates
a resemblance that reality of its own is a reality. This
may be going round a circle, first clockwise, then anti-
clockwise If the savor of life is the savor of reality,
the fact will estabhsh itself whichever way one ap-
proaches it

The relations between the ego and reality must be left
largely on the margin. Yet Narcissus did not expect,
when he looked in the stream, to find in his hair a
serpent coiled to strike, nor, when he looked in his own
eyes there, to be met by a look of hate, nor, in general,
to discover himself at the center of an inexplicable ugli-
ness from which he would be bound to avert himself On
the contrary, he sought out his image everywhere be-
cause it was the principle of his nature to do so and, to
go a step beyond that, because it was the principle of his
nature, as it is of ours, to expect to find pleasure in what

80 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

he found Narcissism, then, involves something beyond
the prime sense of the word. It involves, also, this prin-
ciple, that as we seek out our resemblances we expect
to find pleasure in doing so, that is to say, in what we
find So strong is that expectation that we find nothing
else What is true of the observations of ourselves is
equally true of the observations of resemblances be-
tween other things having no relation to us We say
that the sea, when it expands in a calm and immense re-
flection of the sky, resembles the sky, and this statement
gives us pleasure We enjoy the resemblance for the
same reason that, if it were possible to look into the sea as
into glass and if we should do so and suddenly should
behold there some extraordinary transfiguration of our-
selves, the experience would strike us as one of those
amiable revelations that nature occasionally vouchsafes
to favorites So, when we think of arpeggios, we think of
opening wings and the effect of the resemblance is pleas-
urable When we read Ecclesiastes the effect of the sym-
bols is pleasurable because as symbols they are resem-
blances and as resemblances they are pleasurable and
they are pleasurable because it is a principle of our nature
that they should be, the principle being not something
derived from Narcissism since Narcissism itself is merely
an evidence of the operation of the principle that we ex-
pect to find pleasure in resemblances

We have been trying to get at a truth about poetry, to
get at one of the principles that compose the theory of

Three Academic Pieces 81

poetry It comes to this, that poetry is a part of the struc-
ture of reality If this has been demonstrated, it pretty
much amounts to saying that the structure of poetry and
the structure of reality are one or, in effect, that poetry
and reality are one, or should be This may be less thesis
than hypothesis Yet hypotheses relating to poetry, al-
though they may appear to be very distant illuminations,
could be the fires of fate, if rhetoric ever meant anything.

There is a gradus ad Metaphoram The nature of a
metaphor is, like the nature of a play, comic, tragic,
tragic-comic and so on. It may be poetic. A poetic meta-
phor — that is to say, a metaphor poetic in a sense more
specific than the sense in which poetry and metaphor are
one— appears to be poetry at its source It is At least
it is poetry at one of its sources although not necessarily
the most fecundating But the steps to this particular
abstraction, the gradus ad Metaphoram in respect to the
general sense in which poetry and metaphor are one, are,
like the ascent to any of the abstractions that interest
us importantly, an ascent through illusion which gathers
round us more closely and thickly, as we might expect it
to do, the more we penetrate it.

In the fewest possible words since, as between resem-
blances, one is always a little more nearly perfect than
another and since, from this, it is easy for perfectionism
of a sort to evolve, it is not too extravagant to think of
resemblances and of the repetitions of resemblances as
a source of the ideal. In short, metaphor has its aspect of

8a THE NECESSARY ANGEL

the ideal This aspect of it cannot be dismissed merely
because we think that we have long since outlived the
ideal. The truth is that we are constantly outliving it
and yet the ideal itself remains alive with an enormous
life.

Three Academic Pieces 83

SOMEONE PUTS A PINEAPPLE TOGETHER
I

juventes, O filii, he contemplates
A wholly artificial nature, in which
The profusion of metaphor has been increased.

It is something on a table that he sees.
The root of a form, as of this fruit, a fund,
The angel at the center of this rind,

This husk of Cuba, tufted emerald,
Himself, may be, the irreducible X
At the bottom of imagined artifice,

Its inhabitant and elect expositor.

It is as if there were three planets the sun,

The moon and the imagination, or, say,

Day, night and man and his endless effigies.

If he sees an object on a table, much like

A jar of the shoots of an infant country, green

And bright, or like a venerable urn,
Which, from the ash within it, fortifies
A green that is the ash of what green is,

He sees it in this tangent of himself.

And m this tangent it becomes a thing

Of weight, on which the weightless rests, from which

84 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

The ephemeras of the tangent swarm, the chance
Concourse of planetary originals.
Yet, as it seems, of human residence.

11

He must say nothing of the fruit that is
Not true, nor think it, less He must defy
The metaphor that murders metaphor.

He seeks as image a second of the self,
Made subtle by truth's most jealous subtlety,
Like the true light of the truest sun, the true

Power in the waving of the wand of the moon,
Whose shining is the intelligence of our sleep.
He seeks an image certain as meaning is

To sound, sound's substance and executant,
The particular tingle in a proclamation
That makes it say the little thing it says,

Below the prerogative jumble. The fruit so seen
As a part of the nature that he contemplates
Is fertile with more than changes of the light

On the table or in the colors of the room

Its propagations are more erudite,

Like precious scholia jotted down in the dark.

Three Academic Pieces 85

Did not the age that bore him bear him among
Its infiltrations' There had been an age
When a pineapple on the table was enough,

Without the forfeit scholar coming m,
Without has enkrgings and pale arrondissements,
Without the furious roar in his capital.

Green had, those days, its own implacable sting.
But now a habit of the truth had formed
To protect him in a privacy, in which

The scholar, captious, told him what he could

Of there, where the truth was not the respect of one,

But always of many things. He had not to be told

Of the incredible subjects of poetry.

He was willing they should remain incredible,

Because the incredible, also, has its truth,

Its tuft of emerald that is real, for all

Its invitation to false metaphor

The incredible gave him a purpose to believe.

in
How thick this gobbet is with overlays,
The double fruit of boisterous epicures,
Like the same orange repeating on one tree

86 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

A single self Divest reality

Of its propriety Admit the shaft

Of that third planet to the table and then:

i. The hut stands by itself beneath the palms.

2,. Out of their bottle the green genii come

3. A vine has climbed the other side of the wall

4 The sea is spouting upward out of rocks.

5 The symbol of feasts and of oblivion

6. White sky, pink sun, trees on a distant peak.

7. These lozenges are nailed-up lattices

8 The owl sits humped It has a hundred eyes
9. The coconut and cockerel in one

10 This is how yesterday's volcano looks.

1 1 There is an island Palahude by name —
12. An uncivil shape like a gigantic haw.

These casual exfoliations are

Of the tropic of resemblance, sprigs

Of Capricorn or as the sign demands,

Apposites, to the slightest edge, of the whole
Undescribed composition of the sugar-cone,
Shiftings of an inchoate crystal tableau,

Three Academic Pieces 87

The momentary footings of a climb

Up the pineapple, a table Alp and yet

An Alp, a purple Southern mountain bisqued

With the molten mixings of related things,
Cat's taste possibly or possibly Danish lore,
The small luxuriations that portend

Universal delusions of universal grandeurs,
The slight incipiences, of which the form,
At last, is the pineapple on the table or else

An object the sum of its complications, seen
And unseen. This is everybody's world.
Here the total artifice reveals itself

As the total reality. Therefore it is

One says even of the odor of this fruit,

That steeps the room, quickly, then not at all,

It is more than the odor of this core of earth
And water It is that which is distilled
In the prolific ellipses that we know,

In the planes that tilt hard revelations on

The eye, a geometric glitter, tiltings

As of sections collecting toward the greenest cone.

88 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

OF IDEAL TIME AND CHOICE

Since thirty mornings are required to make
A day of which we say, this is the day
That we desired, a day of blank, blue wheels,

Involving the four corners of the sky,
Lapised and lacqued and freely emeraldine
In the space it fills, the silent motioner

There, of clear, revolving crystalline,
Since thirty summers are needed for a year
And thirty years, in the galaxies of birth,

Are time for counting and remembering,

And fill the earth with young men centuries old

And old men, who have chosen, and are cold

Because what they have chosen is their choice
No more and because they lack the will to tell
A matin gold from gold of Hesperus

The dot, the pale pole of resemblances
Experienced yet not well seen, of how
Much choosing is the final choice made up,

And who shall speak it, what child or wanderer
Or woman weeping in a room or man,
The last man given for epitome,

Three Academic Pieces 89

Upon whose lips the dissertation sounds,
And in what place, what exultant terminal,
And at what time both of the year and day;

And what heroic nature of what text
Shall be the celebration in the words
Of that oration, the happiest sense in which

A world agrees, thought's compromise, resolved
At last, the center of resemblance, found
Under the bones of time's philosophers?

The orator will say that we ourselves

Stand at the center of ideal time,

The inhuman making choice of a human self.

About One of
Marianne Moore's Poems

[ 93 ]

M,

_Y purpose is to bring together one of Miss
Moore's poems and a paper, "On Poetic Truth, 1 ' by H D
Lewis. The poem, "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron, 1 " has
just been reprinted in the Partisan Reader. The paper is
to be found in the July number (1946) of Philosophy,
the Journal of the British Institute of Philosophy (Mac-
millan, London).

Mr. Lewis begins by saying that poetry has to do with
reality in its most individual aspect An isolated fact, cut
loose from the universe, has no significance for the poet.
It derives its significance from the reality to which it be-
longs. To see things in their true perspective, we require
to draw very extensively upon experiences that are past.
All that we see and hear is given a meaning in this way.
There is in reality an aspect of individuality at which ev-
ery form of rational explanation stops short Now, in his
Euphues, Lyly repeats the following bit of folk-lore.

Let them both remember that the Estridge
digesteth harde yron to -preserve his health.

94 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

The "Estridge, 11 then, is the subject of Miss Moore's
poem In the second stanza she says

This bird watches his chicks with
a maternal concentration, after

he has sat on the eggs

at night six weeks, his legs
their only weapon of defense.

The Encyclopaedia Bntanmca says of the ostrich:

Extremely fleet of foot, when brought to bay the ostrich
uses its strong legs with great effect Several hens com-
bine to lay their eggs in one nest, and on these the cock
sits by night, while the females relieve one another by
day

Somehow, there is a difference between Miss Moore's
bird and the bird of the Encyclopaedia. This difference
grows when she describes her bird as

The friend
of hippotigers and wild
asses, it is as
though schooled by them he was

the best of the unflying
pegasi

The difference signalizes a transition from one reality to
another It is the reality of Miss Moore that is the indi-
vidual reality. That of the Encyclopaedia is the reality of

About One of Marianne Moore'' s Poems 95

isolated fact. Miss Moore's reality is significant. An
aesthetic integration is a reality.

Nowhere in the poem does she speak directly of the
subject of the poem by its name. She calls it "'the camel-
sparrow 11 and "the large sparrow Xenophon saw walking
by a stream, 11 "the bird, 11 u quadruped-like bird 11 and

alert gargantuan
little-winged, magnificently
speedy running-bird.

This, too, marks a difference To confront fact in its total
bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience.
Reality is not the thing but the aspect of the thing At
first reading, this poem has an extraordinarily factual ap-
pearance But it is, after all, an abstraction Mr Lewis
says that for Plato the only reality that mattered is ex-
emplified best for us in the principles of mathematics.
The aim of our lives should be to draw ourselves away
as much as possible from the unsubstantial, fluctuating
facts of the world about us and establish some commun-
ion with the objects which are apprehended by thought
and not sense This was the source of Plato's asceticism.
To the extent that Miss Moore finds only allusion toler-
able she shares that asceticism While she shares it she
does so only as it may be necessary for her to do so in
order to establish a particular reality or, better, a reality
of her own particulars the "overt 11 reality of Mr Lewis
Take, for example, her particulars of the bird's egg. She
says:

96 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

The egg -piously shown

as Leek's very own
pom which Castor and Pollux hatched,
was an ostrich-egg.

Again she speaks of

jerwel-
gorgeous ugly egg-shell
goblet

It is obvious from these few quotations that Miss Moore
has already found an individual reality in the ostrich and
again in its egg. After all, it is the subject in poetry that
releases the energy of the poet.

Mr Lewis says that poetry has to do with matter that
is foreign and alien. It is never familiar to us in the way
in which Plato wished the conquests of the mind to be
familiar. On the contrary its function, the need which it
meets and which has to be met in some way in every age
that is not to become decadent or barbarous, is precisely
this contact with reality as it impinges upon us from out-
side, the sense that we can touch and feel a solid reality
which does not wholly dissolve itself into the conceptions
of our own minds. It is the individual and particular that
does this. No fact is a bare fact, no individual fact is a
universe in itself. Is not Miss Moore creating or finding
and revealing some such reality in the stanza that
follows?

About One of Marianne Moore s Poems 97

Six hundred ostrich-brains served
at one banquet, the ostrich-plume-tipped tent
and desert spear . . .

eight pairs of ostriches
in harness, dramatize a

meaning always missed

by the externalist.

Here the sparrow-camel is all pomp and ceremony, a part
of justice of which it was not only the symbol, as Miss
Moore says, but also the source of its panoply and the
delicacy of its feasts; that is to say, a part of unprece-
dented experience.

Miss Moore's finical phraseology is an element in her
procedure. These lines illustrate this:

Although the sepyornis
or roc that lives in Madagascar, and
the moa are extinct

and

Heroism is exhausting

But what irrevocably detaches her from the Encyclo-
paedia is the irony of the following.

How
could he, prized for plumes and eggs and young, used
even as a riding-
beast, respect men hiding

98 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

actorlike in ostrich-shins, with

the right hand making the neck move

as if alive and

from a hag the left hand

strewing grain, that ostriches
might he decoyed and killed'

and the delighted observation of the following:

whose comic duckling head on its

great neck, revolves with compass-
needle nervousness,
■when he stands guard, in S-

lifce foragings as he is

preening the down on his leaden-skinned hack.

The gist of the poem is that the camel-sparrow has es-
caped the greed that has led to the extinction of other
birds linked to it in size, by its solicitude for its own wel-
fare and that of its chicks. Considering the great purposes
that poetry must serve, the interest of the poem is not in
its meaning but in this, that it illustrates the achieving of
an individual reality. Mr. Lewis has some very agreeable
things to say about meaning He says that the extraction
of a meaning from a poem and appraisement of it by ra-
tional standards of truth have mainly been due to en-
thusiasm for moral or religious truth He protests against
the abstraction of this content from the whole and ap-
praisement of it by other than aesthetic standards. The

About One of Marianne Moore's Poems 99

"something said" is important, but it is important for the
poem only in so far as the saying of that particular some-
thing in a special way is a revelation of reality. He says

If I am right, the essence of art is insight of a special
land into reality

Moreover, if he is right, the question as to Miss Moore's
poem is not in respect to its meaning but in respect to its
potency as a work of art. Does it make us so aware of
the reality with which it is concerned, because of the
poignancy and penetration of the poet, that it forces some-
thing upon our consciousness? The reality so imposed
need not be a great reality.

Of course, if it does, it serves our purpose quite as cer-
tainly as a less modest poem would serve it It is here,
Mr Lewis concludes, that the affinity of art and religion
is most evident today He says that both have to mediate
for us a reality not ourselves and that this is what the
poet does and that the supreme virtue here is humility,
for the humble are they that move about the world with
the lure of the real in their hearts.

Life, not the artist, creates or reveals reality: time and
experience in the poet, in the painter During this last
September, I visited the old Zeller house in the Tulpe-
hocken, in Pennsylvania. This family of religious refu-
gees came to this country in 1709, lived for some fifteen

IOO THE NECESSARY ANGEL

or twenty years in the Scoharie region in New York and
then went down the Susquehanna to the valley in which
the house was built. Over the door there is an architec-
tural cartouche of the cross with palm-branches below,
placed there, no doubt, to indicate that the house and
those that lived in it were consecrated to the glory of
God. From this doorway they faced the hills that were
part of the frame of their valley, the familiar shelter in
which they spent their laborious lives, happy in the faith
and worship in which they rejoiced. Their reality con-
sisted of both the visible and the invisible On another
occasion, a man went with me to visit Christ Church
near Stouchsburg This stout old Lutheran felt about his
church very much as the Irish are said to feel about God.
Kate O'Brien says that in Ireland God is a member of the
family. The man told me that last spring a scovy duck
had built her nest in the chimney of the church When,
finally, her brood was hatched, the ducklings came out
of a stove in one of the rooms in the basement of the
church. There were six of them and they are alive today
on the sexton's farm. When the committee of the church
m charge of the building was making its plans last spring,
this true lover of his church agreed to paint the fence
around the adjoining graveyard. In part, this fence con-
sisted of cast-iron spears He painted the spear-head silver
and the staves black, one by one, week after week, until
the job was done. Yet obviously this man's reality is the
church-building but as a fellow-existence, of a sort.

About One of Marianne Moore's Poems 101

As we drove along the road, we met one of the Lu-
theran's friends, who had been leader of the choir in
Trinity Tulpehocken Reformed Church for more than a
generation He had wrapped his throat up in flannel be-
cause, he said, one of his tendons was sore At choir-
practice the night before, the hymns for the Sunday serv-
ice had been selected. He was on his way to the church
to put the numbers in the rack When he had done this,
he went with us to the old graveyard of this church. This
was an enclosure of about an acre, possibly a little more.
The wall was of limestone about four feet high, weather-
beaten, barren, bald. In the graveyard were possibly
eight or ten sheep, the color of the wall and of many of
the gravestones and even of some of the tufts of grass,
bleached and silvery in the hard sunlight. The droppings
of the sheep fertilized the soil. There were a few cedars
here and there but these only accentuated the sense of
abandonment and destitution, the sense that, after all,
the vast mausoleum of human memory is emptier than
one had supposed Near by stood the manse, also of lime-
stone, apparently vacant, the upper part of each window
white with the half-drawn blind, the lower part black
with the vacantness of the place Although the two eld-
erly men were in a way a diversion from the solitude,
there could not be any effective diversion from the reality
that time and experience had created here, the desolation
that penetrated one like something final. Later, when I
had returned to New York, I went to the exhibition of
books in the Morgan Library held by the American In-

102, THE NECESSARY ANGEL

stitute of Graphic Arts The brilliant pages from Poland,
France, Finland and so on, books of tales, of poetry, of
folk-lore, were as if the barren reality that I had just ex-
perienced had suddenly taken color, become alive and
from a single thing become many things and people,
vivid, active, intently trying out a thousand characters
and illuminations.

It is true that Mr Lewis contemplates a reality ade-
quate to the profound necessities of life today. But it is
no less true that it is easier to try to recognize it or some-
thing like it or the possible beginnings of it than to
achieve it on that scale Thus, the field m poetry is as
great as it is in anything else. Nothing illustrates this
better and nothing illustrates the importance of poetry
better than this possibility that within it there may yet be
found a reality adequate to the profound necessities of
life today or for that matter any day Miss Moore's poem
is an instance of method and is not an example beyond
the scale intended by her She may well say:

Que ce nest pas grand merveille de voir que TOstruche
digere le /er, veu que les poulles nen font yas moins

For she is not a proud spirit It may be that proud spirits
love only the Hon or the elephant with its howdah. Miss

About One of Marianne Moore's Poems 103

Moore, however, loves all animals, fierce or mild, an-
cient or modern When she observes them she is trans-
ported into the presence of a recognizable reab'ty, be-
cause, as it happens, she has the faculty of digesting the
"harde yron" of appearance.

Effects of Analogy

[ io7

T

J_H

.he supreme example of analogy in English is Pil-
grims Progress. This overwhelms us with direct anal-
ogy, that is to say the personifications of allegory.
Thus, in the Second Part where Christiana and young
Mercy are on their way toward the Caelestial Country
with Christiana's children to rejoin Christian, they come
at evening to the house of the Interpreter. After the In-
terpreter has shown them his house he leads them into
his garden and

as they were coming m from abroad, they espied a little
robin -with a great spider in his mouth So they looked,
and Mercy wondred, but Christiana said, what a dis-
paragement is it to such a little pretty bird as the rohin-
red-breast is, he being also a bird above many that
loveth to maintain a kind of sociableness with man, I had
thought they had lived upon crums of bread, or upon
other such harmless matter I like him worse than I did
The Interpreter then replied, This robin is an emblem
very apt to set forth some professors by; for to sight they
are as this robin, pretty of note colour and carriage They
seem also to have a very great love for professors that
are sincere; and above all other to desire to sociate with,
and to be in their company, as if they could live upon the

108 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

good mans cruras. They pretend also that therefore it is
that they frequent the house of the godly, and the ap-
pointments of the Lord, hut when they are hy themselves,
as the robin, they can catch and gobble up spiders, they
can change their diet, drink iniquity, and swallow down
sin like water.

In French, the supreme example of analogy is, prob-
ably, the Fables of La Fontaine Of these, none is better
known than the fable of u The Crow and the Fox, 11 which
goes, in the translation of Edward Marsh, as follows.

A Crow sat perched upon an oak,

And in his beak he held a cheese

A fox snuffed up the savoury breeze,

And thus in honey d accent spoke.

"O Prince of Crows, such grace of mien

Has never m these parts been seen.

If but your song be half as good,

You are the Phoenix of the wood' 11

The Crow, beside himself with pleasure,

And eager to display his voice,

Opened his beak, and dropt his treasure.

The Fox was on it in a trice.

"Learn, sir" said he, "that flatterers live

On those who swaHow what they say

A cheese is not too much to give

For such a piece of sound advice 1 ''''

The Crow, ashamed t'have been such easy prey,

Swore, though too late, he shouldn't catch him twice.

Effects of Analogy 109

As we read Bunyan we are distracted by the double
sense of the analogy and we are rather less engaged by
the symbols than we are by what is symbolized. The
other meaning divides our attention and this diminishes
our enjoyment of the story But of such an indisputable
masterpiece it must be true that one reader, oblivious of
the other meaning, reads it for the story and another
reader, oblivious of the story, reads it for the other mean-
ing, and that each finds in perfection what he wants But
there is a third reader, one for whom the story and the
other meaning should come together like two aspects that
combine to produce a third or, if they do not combine,
inter-act, so that one influences the other and produces
an effect similar in kind to the prismatic formations that
occur about us in nature in the case of reflections and re-
fractions. Bunyan nowhere produces these prismatic crys-
tallizations As for such things, he might as well be a
collection of primitive woodcuts In La Fontaine, there
is a difference. We are not distracted. Our attention is on
the symbol, which is interesting in itself The other
meaning does not dog the symbol like its shadow It is
not attached to it Here the effect of analogy almost
ceases to exist and the reason for this is, of course, that
we are not particularly conscious of it We do not have
to stand up to it and take it. It is like a play of thought,
some trophy that we ourselves gather, some meaning
that we ourselves supply. It is like a pleasant shadow,
faint and volatile In Bunyan, it is the other meaning that
is the solid matter, in La Fontaine, the solid matter is

HO THE NECESSARY ANGEL

the story. The difference may be a national difference.
We are interested m it only as a difference.

Commonly, analogy is a term in logic. Susan Stebbing
in her Logic m Practice says

Inference by analogy consists in inferring that, since
two cases are alike in certain respects, they will also be
alike in some other respect For example, since Mars re-
sembles the Earth in certain respects, we infer that Mars
also is inhabited This may be a very risky inference, for
Mars differs from the Earth in some respects, and these
differences may be relevant to the property of being in-
habited.

Now, we are not thinking, here, of analogy in this
narrow sense. We are thinking of it as likeness, as re-
semblance between parallels and yet parallels that are
parallels only m the imagination, and we are thinking of
it in its relation to poetry Finally we are thinking of it
from the point of view of the effect it produces The other
day, Kenneth Burke, in the course of a review of Rose-
mond Tuve's Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, re-
ferred to the introduction of rhetoric into the analysis of
imagery. He said that it gave a clear picture of the ways
in which logic, rhetoric and poetic are interwoven

in contrast with the doctrines of those who would con-
fine logic to science, rhetoric to propaganda or advertis-

Effects of Analogy

in

mg, and thus leave for -poetic a few spontaneous sensa-
tions not much higher m the intellectual scale than the
twitchings of a decerebrated frog

The analogy between the spontaneous sensations of a
poet and the muscular twitchings of a decerebrated frog
communicated Mr Burke's antipathy to the doctrines on
which he was commenting and was a way of charac-
terizing those doctrines as at once futile, ugly and ludi-
crous His analogy had its source in a feeling of scorn
and took the form of an image that expressed his scorn.
In short, his image had its origin in an emotion, was
charged with that emotion and became the medium for
communicating it Thus, it belongs to that large class of
images of emotional origin in which the nature of the
image is analogous to the nature of the emotion from
which it springs, and when one speaks of images, one
means analogies If, then, an emotional image or, say,
an emotional analogy communicates the emotion that
generates it, its effect is to arouse the same emotion in
others. There is nothing of this in the sort of analogy that
we find in Pilgrim's Progress The very scale and de-
liberateness of allegory are against it To be sure, Pil-
grims Progress is prose. In a long poem, so many emo-
tions, so many sensations, are stirred up into activity
that, after a time, the reader finds himself in a state of
such sensibility that it cannot be said that the scale and
deliberateness of allegory fail to produce an emotional
effect. A prolonged reading of Spenser's Faerie Queene,

112, THE NECESSARY ANGEL

for instance, creates just such a state of sensibility In
general, long poems have this attribute, derived from
their very length, assuming that they have been charged
throughout with the emotions of the poet.

In order to see how true it is that in images of emo-
tional origin the image partakes of the nature of the emo-
tion, let us analyze a passage from one of the poems of
Allen Tate He is looking at a young woman dead in her
bed. He says:

For look you how her body stiffly lies
Just as she left it, unprepared to stay,
The posture waiting on the sleeping eyes,
While the bodys life, deep as a covered well,
Instinctive as the wind, busy as May,
Burns out a secret passageway to hell

He is moved by the ghastliness and ghostliness of the
body before him He communicates the ghastliness by
a direct statement her body stiffly lies But the ghostli-
ness he communicates by making of the posture one
of death's attendants. The thoughts of life and death
commingle. Under the hidden image of the tomb, her
spirit is instinctive as the wind in its blind and fateful
freedom.

A scene not too dissimilar gives rise to a different feel-
ing in John Crowe Ransom. In his Bells for John White-
side's Daughter, he begins by describing her quizzically
and yet as a little old lady who used to harry the geese on
her pond and, with a rod, make them rise:

Effects of Analogy no

But now go the bells, and we are ready,
In our house we are sternly stopped
To say we are vexed at her brown study,
Lying so ■primly propped

What is it that Mr Ransom feels at the sight of John
Whiteside's daughter, dead, except the same quizzicality
that he felt at the sight of her alive? He communicates
this in a quizzical image of death as a brown study, but
as a brown study vexing in the case of one that lies so
primly propped Neither Mr. Tate nor Mr. Ransom is an
emotional poet Nor with such men is it a question of
degree. Rather, their sensibilities have large orbits.

We have not been dealing, up to this point, with the
appositeness of figures of speech but with their emotional
authenticity, which they have the power to propagate.
The emotional analogy is only one. When St Matthew
in his Gospel says that Jesus went about all the cities,
teaching and preaching, and that

when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with com-
passion on them, because they . . . were scattered
abroad, as sheev having no shepherd,

the analogy between the multitudes scattered abroad and
sheep having no shepherd is not an emotional analogy.
On the contrary, it is as if Matthew had poised himself
if only for an instant, had invoked his imagination and
had made a choice of what it offered to his mind, a choice
based on the degree of the appositeness of the image He
could do this without being notably deliberate because

114 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

the imagination does not require for its projections the
same amount of time that the reason requires I spoke a
moment ago of a reader for whom the two elements of an
analogy should combine to produce a third There is still
another reader for whom the effect of analogy is the effect
of the degree of appositeness, for whom the imaginative
projection, the imaginative deviation, raises the question
of Tightness, as if in the vast association of ideas there
existed for every object its appointed objectification In
such a case, the object and its image become inseparable
It follows that for this fourth reader the effect of anal-
ogy is the effect of consummation. The example from
Matthew is not only a good example, but a familiar one
One almost equally f amiliar is from the Greek Anthology,
m Professor MackaiFs translation:

Even as a Mine on her dry pole I support myself now
on a staff and death calls me to Hades.

This epigram has about it something of the modern sense
of epigram Leonidas does not compare himself to a vine
on her dry pole without a certain slyness. The image is
not only that of the old man wandering on the edge of
night It includes, also, something of his tatteredness,
something of the weather-beaten figure of the vagabond,
which by its eccentricity arouses the sense of pathos but
not the feeling of sorrow These two citations, the one
of sheep having no shepherd and the other of the vine on
her dry pole, quite adequately illustrate the discipline that
comes from appositeness in the highest degree

Effects of Analogy ng

It is primarily a discipline of Tightness The poet is
constantly concerned with two theories One relates to
the imagination as a power within him not so much to
destroy reality at will as to put it to his own uses He
comes to feel that his imagination is not wholly his own
but that it may be part of a much larger, much more po-
tent imagination, which it is his affair to try to get at
For this reason, he pushes on and lives, or tries to live,
as Paul Valery did, on the verge of consciousness This
often results in poetry that is marginal, subliminal The
same theory exists in relation to prose, to painting and
other arts The second theory relates to the imagination
as a power within him to have such insights into reality
as will make it possible for him to be sufficient as a poet
in the very center of consciousness This results, or
should result, in a central poetry Dr Whitehead con-
cluded his Modes of Thought by saying.

. . . the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysti-
cism. . . . Philosophy is akin to poetry, and both of
them seek to express that ultimate good sense -which we
term civilization.

The proponents of the first theory believe that it will be
a part of their achievement to have created the poetry of
the future. It may be that the poetry of the future will
be to the poetry of the present what the poetry of the
present is to the ballad The proponents of the second
theory believe that to create the poetry of the present is
an incalculable difficulty, which rarely is achieved, fully

Il6 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

and robustly, by anyone. They think that there is enough
and more than enough to do with what faces us and
concerns us directly and that in poetry as an art, and,
for that matter, in any art, the central problem is al-
ways the problem of reality. The adherents of the im-
agination are mystics to begin with and pass from one
mysticism to another The adherents of the central are
also mystics to begin with But all their desire and all
their ambition is to press away from mysticism toward
that ultimate good sense which we term civilization
The analogy of Matthew and the image of Leonidas are
particles of that ultimate good sense.

In departing from the finality and Tightness of two
ancient specimens, let us make use of a third for the
purpose of pointing out that it is not possible to measure
the distances away from Tightness except in the roughest
manner nor to indicate anything more than crude dif-
ferences of effect. Virgil, in the first book of the Georgics,
in Day Lewis' translation, says.

Winter's an off-time
For farmers . . .

and they forget their worries;
Just as, when ships in cargo have come to -port at last,
Glad to he home the sailors adorn their poops with gar-
lands.

This expresses an analogy between farmers after a sum-
mer and sailors after a voyage, fortified by secondary
analogies between the worries of farmers and the trials

Effects of Analogy 117

of sailors, between crops and cargoes and between har-
vesting and making port. It is therefore a figure over
which Virgil did something more than poise himself for
an instant. It is a considered elaboration, a prototype of
the considered elaborations with which in the eighteenth
century, say, English poets were accustomed to em-
bellish their pages It does not click. If it is apposite at
all it is only after we have thought about it and by that
time we have lost interest in it. It is one of the multitude
of figures of speech that are merely idle. It does not raise
any question of taste Nothing m Virgil could. One re-
members the description of Virgil as the delight of all
men of taste. Nevertheless, to go back to Allen Tate, it
is just not a thing that

. . . strikes like a hawk the crouching hare.

It would not be hard to find elsewhere examples of
analogy displaying this or that defect, artificiality, in-
congruity, lack of definition. This is not an anatomy of
metaphor. Nor is it an attempt to do more than to single
out a few of the effects of analogy. The field must be one
which has already been examined, for other purposes, by
literary critics and historians, writers on aesthetics, psy-
chologists, Freudians. Poetry is almost incredibly one
of the effects of analogy. This statement involves much
more than the analogy of figures of speech, since other-
wise poetry would be little more than a trick. But it is
almost incredibly the outcome of figures of speech or,
what is the same thing, the outcome of the operation of

Il8 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

one imagination on another through the instrumentality
of the figures To identify poetry and metaphor or meta-
morphosis is merely to abbreviate the last remark There
is always an analogy between nature and the imagina-
tion, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric
of that parallel a rhetoric in which the feeling of one
man is communicated to another in words of the ex-
quisite appositeness that takes away all their verbality.

Another mode of analogy is to be found in the per-
sonality of the poet. But this mode is no more limited to
the poet than the mode of metaphor is so limited. This
mode proposes for study the poet's sense of the world
as the source of poetry. The corporeal world exists as
the common denominator of the incorporeal worlds of its
inhabitants. If there are people who live only in the
corporeal world, enjoying the wind and the weather and
supplying standards of normality, there are other people
who are not so sure of the wind and the weather and
who supply standards of abnormality. It is the poet's
sense of the world that is the poet's world The corporeal
world, the familiar world of the commonplace, in short,
our world, is one sense of the analogy that develops be-
tween our world and the world of the poet The poet's
sense of the world is the other sense. It is the analogy
between these two senses that concerns us.

We could not speak of our world as something to be
distinguished from the poet's sense of it unless we ob-

Effects of Analogy 119

jectified it and recognized it as having an existence apart
from the projection of his personality, as land and sea,
sky and cloud He himself desires to make the distinction
as part of the process of realizing himself. Once the dis-
tinction has been made, it becomes an instrument for
the exploration of poetry By means of it we can deter-
mine the relation of the poet to his subject This would
be simple if he wrote about his own world. We could
compare it with ours But what he writes about is his
sense of our world If he is a melancholy person he gives
us a melancholy sense of our world. By way of illustra-
tion, here is a passage from James Thomson's The City of
Dreadful Night:

We do not ask a longer term of strife,
Weakness and weariness and nameless woes

We do not claim renewed and endless life

When this which is our torment here shall close.

An everlasting conscious inanition I

We yearn for speedy death in full fruition.
Dateless oblivion and divine repose.

On the other hand, a stronger man, Walt Whitman, in
A Clear Midnight gives us this

This is thy hour, O soul, thy free flight into the wordless.
Away from hooks, away from art, the day erased, the

lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, -pondering the

themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

12,0 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

The illustrations are endless but really none is re-
quired

A man's sense of the world is born with him and
persists, and penetrates the ameliorations of education
and experience of life His species is as fixed as his genus
For each man, then, certain subjects are congenital
Now, the poet manifests his personality, first of all, by
his choice of subject Temperament is a more explicit
word than personality and would no doubt be the exact
word to use, since it emphasizes the manner of thinking
and feeling It is agreeable to think of the poet as a whole
biological mechanism and not as a subordinate mecha-
nism within that larger one, Temperament, too, has at-
tracted a pejorative meaning It should be clear that in
dealing with the choice of subject we are dealing with
one of the vital factors in poetry or in any art. Great num-
bers of poets come and go who have never had a subject
at all What is true of poets in this respect is equally true
of painters, as the existence of schools of painters all do-
ing more or less the same thing at the same time demon-
strates The leader of the school has a subject. But his
followers merely have his subject Thus Picasso has a
subject, a subject that devours him and devastates his
region Possibly a better illustration would be one that is
less intimidating Whether we like it or not, all of us who
have radios or who go to the movies hear a great deal of
popular music. Usually this is music without a subject
You have only to tabulate the titles of the songs you
hear over a short period of time to convince yourself of

Effects of Analogy 121

this The titles are trivial, catchy, trite and silly. Love is
not a subject unless the writer of the song is in love A
man peddles love-songs because it is easier to do than it
is to peddle coconuts, and this is as true of the man who
writes the words as it is of the man who writes the music
What is the poet's subject 5 It is his sense of the world.
For him, it is inevitable and inexhaustible. If he departs
from it he becomes artificial and laborious and while his
artifice may be skillful and his labor perceptive no one
knows better than he that what he is doing, under such
circumstances, is not essential to him It may help him
to feel that it may be essential to someone else But this
justification, though it might justify what he does in the
eyes of all the world, would never quite justify him in his
own eyes There is nothing of selfishness in this. It is
often said of a man that his work is autobiographical in
spite of every subterfuge It cannot be otherwise. Cer-
tainly, from the point of view from which we are now
regarding it, it cannot be otherwise, even though it may
be totally without reference to himself There was a time
when the ivory tower was merely a place of seclusion,
like a cottage on a hill-top or a cabin by the sea. Today,
it is a kind of lock-up of which our intellectual constables
are the appointed wardens. Is it not time that someone
questioned this degradation, not for the purpose of restor-
ing the isolation of the tower but in order to establish the
integrity of its builder? Our rowdy gun-men may not
appreciate what comes from that tower Others do Was
there ever any poetry more wholly the poetry of the

122 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

ivory tower than the poetry of Mallarme? Was there ever
any music more wholly the music of the ivory tower than
the music of Debussy'

The truth is that a man's sense of the world dictates
his subjects to him and that this sense is derived from his
personality, his temperament, over which he has little
control and possibly none, except superficially. It is not
a literary problem It is the problem of his mind and
nerves These sayings are another form of the saying
that poets are born not made. A poet writes of twilight
because he shrinks from noon-day He writes about the
country because he dislikes the city, and he likes the one
and dislikes the other because of some trait of mind or
nerves, that is to say, because of something in himself
that influences his thinking and feeling. So seen, the
poet and his subject are inseparable There are stresses
that he invites, there are stresses that he avoids There
are colors that have the blandest effect on him, there are
others with which he can do nothing but find fault. In
music he likes the strings. But the horn shocks him A
flat landscape extending in all directions to immense dis-
tances placates him But he shrugs his shoulders at moun-
tains One young woman seems to be someone that he
would like to know, another seems to be someone that he
must know without fail

Recently, a very great deal has been said about the
relation of the poet to his community and to other people,
and as the propaganda on behalf of the community and
other people gathers momentum a great deal more will

Effects of Analogy 123

be said But if a poet's subject is congenital this is beside
the point Or is it? The ivory tower was offensive if the
man who lived in it wrote, there, of himself for himself
It was not offensive if he used it because he could do
nothing without concentration, as no one can, and be-
cause, there, he could most effectively struggle to get at
his subject, even if his subject happened to be the com-
munity and other people, and nothing else It may be that
the poet's congenital subject is precisely the community
and other people. If it is not, he may have to ask Shosta-
kovich and Prokofiev and their fellow musicians and such
writers as Michael Zoshchenko what to do next These
men, who backslide once in so often, should know They
are experienced

The second way by which a poet manifests his per-
sonality is by his style. This is too well understood to per-
mit discussion What has just been said with respect to
choice of subject applies equally to style. The individual
dialect of a poet who happens to have one, analogous to
the speech common to his time and place and yet not that
common speech, is in the same position as the language
of poetry generally when the language of poetry generally
is not the common speech. Both produce effects singular
to analogy. Beyond that the dialect is not in point

A man's sense of the world may be only his own or it
may be the sense of many people Whatever it is it in-
volves his fate It may involve only his own or it may
involve that of many people The measure of the poet is
the measure of his sense of the world and of the extent

124 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

to which it involves the sense of other people. We have
to stop and think now and then of what he writes as
implicit with that significance. Thus in the lines of
Leonidas:

Even as a vine on her dry -pole I support myself now
on a staff and death calls me to Hades

we have to think of the reality and to read the lines as one
having the reality at heart, an old man at that point at
which antiquity begins to resume what everything else
has left behind; or if you think of the lines as a figuration
of despair on the part of the poet, and it is possible to
change them into such a figuration, to read them as lines
communicating a feeling that it was not within the poet's
power to suppress.

4
Still another mode of analogy is to be found in the
music of poetry. It is a bit old hat and romantic and, no
doubt at all, the dated forms are intolerable In recent
years, poetry began to change character about the time
when painting began to change character Each lost a
certain euphrasy. But, after all, the music of poetry has
not come to an end. Is not Eliot a musical poet? Listen to
part of what the lamp hummed of the moon in Rhapsody
on a Windy Night-

A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone

Effects of Analogy I2 h

With all the old nocturnal smells

That ctoss and ctoss across her brain.

The reminiscence comes

Of sunless dry geraniums

And dust va crevices,

Smells of chestnuts in the streets

And female smells in shuttered rooms

And cigarettes in corridors

And cocktail smells in bars

This is a specimen of what is meant by music today. It
contains rhymes at irregular intervals and it is intensely
cadenced. But yesterday, or the day before, the time from
which the use of the word "music" in relation to poetry
has come down to us, music meant something else. It
meant metrical poetry with regular rhyme schemes re-
peated stanza after stanza All of the stanzas were alike
in form. As a result of this, what with the repetitions of
the beats of the lines, and the constant and recurring
harmonious sounds, there actually was a music. But with
the disappearance of all this, the use of the word "music"
m relation to poetry is as I said a moment ago a bit old
hat anachronistic Yet the passage from Eliot was mu-
sical It is simply that there has been a change in the
nature of what we mean by music. It is like the change
from Haydn to a voice intoning It is like the voice of an
actor reciting or declaiming or of some other figure con-
cealed, so that we cannot identify him, who speaks with
a measured voice which is often disturbed by his feeling

126 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

for what he says There is no accompaniment. If occa-
sionally the poet touches the triangle or one of the cym-
bals, he does it only because he feels like doing it In-
stead of a musician we have an orator whose speech
sometimes resembles music We have an eloquence and
it is that eloquence that we call music every day, without
having much cause to think about it.

What has this music to do with analogy? When we
hear the music of one of the great narrative musicians, as
it tells its tale, it is like finding our way through the dark
not by the aid of any sense but by an instinct that makes
it possible for us to move quickly when the music moves
quickly, slowly when the music moves slowly. It is a
speed that carries us on and through every winding, once
more to the world outside of the music at its conclusion.
It affects our sight of what we see and leaves it ambigu-
ous, somewhat like one thing, somewhat like another In
the meantime the tale is being told and the music excites
us and we identify it with the story and it becomes the
story and the speed with which we are following it.
When it is over, we are aware that we have had an ex-
perience very much like the story just as if we had par-
ticipated in what took place It is exactly as if we had
listened with complete sympathy to an emotional recital.
The music was a communication of emotion It would
not have been different if it had been the music of poetry
or the voice of the protagonist telling the tale or speaking
out his sense of the world How many things we should
have found like in either easel

Effects of Analogy I2 y

5

I have spoken of several kinds of analogy I began
with the personifications of Bunyan and the ammaliza-
tions of La Fontaine. I then spoke of emotional images ,
taking illustrations from several sources, principally Ken-
neth Burke. Next I spoke of what may be called volun-
tary images, quoting from St. Matthew, Leonidas of
Tarentum and Virgil. Finally I spoke of what may be
called involuntary images, quoting from James Thomson
and Walt Whitman and referring to music. It is time,
therefore, to attempt a few generalizations, slight as the
data may be Accordingly, our first generalization is this
Every image is the elaboration of a particular of the sub-
ject of the image If this is true it is a realistic explanation
of the origin of images. Let us go back to the quotation
from St Matthew. Jesus went about all the cities, teach-
ing and preaching, and

when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with com-
passion on them, because they . . . were scattered
abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.

The analogy between men and sheep does not exist under
all circumstances. There came into Matthew's mind in
respect to Jesus going about, teaching and preaching, the
thought that Jesus was a shepherd and immediately the
multitudes scattered abroad and sheep having that par-
ticular in common became interchangeable. The image

128 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

is an elaboration of the particular of the shepherd In the
lines from Leonidas .

Even as a vine on her dry pole I support myself now on
a staff and death calls me to Hades

the particular is the staff This becomes the dry pole, and
the vine follows after There is no analogy between a vine
and an old man under all circumstances But when one
supports itself on a dry pole and the other on a staff, the
case is different Two casual illustrations are not enough
to establish a principle. But they are enough to suggest
the possibility of a principle.

Our second generalization, based on even slighter data,
and proposed in the same experimental way, is this : Ev-
ery image is a restatement of the subject of the image in
the terms of an attitude The metaphor from Kenneth
Burke illustrates this Since it has already been analyzed,
I merely refer to it If there is any merit to what was said
about the sense of the world, that also illustrates the
principle.

Our third generalization is this : Every image is an in-
tervention on the part of the image-maker. One does not
feel the need of so many reservations, if of any, in the
case of this principle But then of the three it is the one
that matters least. It refers to the sense of the world, as
the second principle did, and it could be said to be a phase
of the second principle, if it did not refer to style in addi-
tion to the sense of the world The second principle does
not refer to style.

Effects of Analogy 129

It is rime, too, to attempt a few simplifications of the
whole subject by way of summing it up and of coming
to an end. With one or two exceptions, all of the ex-
amples that we have made use of have been pictorial. The
image has been descriptive or explanatory of the subject
of the image. To say the same thing another way, the
thing stated has been accompanied by a restatement and
the restatement has illustrated and given definition to the
thing stated. The thing stated and the restatement have
constituted an analogy. The venerable, the fundamental
books of the human spirit are vast collections of such
analogies and it is the analogies that have helped to make
these books what they are. The pictorializations of poetry
include much more than figures of speech We have not
been studying images, but, however crudely, analogies,
of which images are merely a part. Analogies are much
the larger subject. And analogies are elusive Take the
case of a man for whom reality is enough, as, at the end
of his life, he returns to it like a man returning from
Nowhere to his village and to everything there that is
tangible and visible, which he has come to cherish and
wants to be near. He sees without images But is he not
seeing a clarified reality of his own? Does he not dwell
in an analogy? His imageless world is, after all, of the
same sort as a world full of the obvious analogies of hap-
piness or unhappiness, innocence or tragedy, thought-
lessness or the heaviness of the mind In any case, these
are the pictorializations of men, for whom the world
exists as a world and for whom life exists as life, the ob-

I30 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

jects of their passions, the objects before which they
come and speak, with intense choosing, words that we
remember and make our own Their words have made a
world that transcends the world and a life livable in that
transcendence It is a transcendence achieved by means
of the minor effects of figurations and the major effects of
the poet's sense of the world and of the motive music
of his poems and it is the imaginative dynamism of all
these analogies together Thus poetry becomes and is a
transcendent analogue composed of the particulars of
reality, created by the poet's sense of the world, that is to
say, his attitude, as he intervenes and interposes the ap-
pearances of that sense.

Imagination as Value

[ 133 ]

I

_t does not seem possible to say of the imagination
that it has a certain single characteristic which of itself
gives it a certain single value as, for example, good or
evil. To say such a thing would be the same thing as to
say that the reason is good or evil or, for that matter, that
human nature is good or evil. Since that is my first point,
let us discuss it.

Pascal called the imagination the mistress of the world.
But as he seems never to have spoken well of it, it is
certain that he did not use this phrase to speak well of
it. He called it the deceptive element in man, the mistress
of error and duplicity and yet not always that, since there
would be an infallible measure of truth if there were an
infallible measure of untruth But being most often false,
it gives no sign of its quality and indicates in the same
way both the true and the false. A little farther on in his
Pensees he speaks of magistrates, their red robes, their
ermines in which they swathe themselves, like furry cats,
the palaces in which they sit in judgment, the fleurs-de-
lis, and the whole necessary, august apparatus He says,
and he enjoys his own malice in saying it, that if medical
men did not have their cassocks and the mules they wore
and if doctors did not have their square hats and robes

134 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

four times too large, they would never have been able to
dupe the world, which is incapable of resisting so genu-
ine a display He refers to soldiers and kings, of whom lie
speaks with complete caution and respect, saying that
they establish themselves by force, the others "par gri-
mace " He justifies monarchs by the strength they possess
and says that it is necessary to have a well-defined reason
to regard like anyone else the Grand Seigneur sur-
rounded, in his superb seraglio, by forty thousand janis-
saries.

However this may be, if respect for magistrates can
be established by their robes and ermines and if justice
can be made to prevail by the appearance of the seats of
justice and if vast populations can be brought to live
peacefully in their homes and to lie down at night with
a sense of security and to get up in the morning confident
that the great machine of organized society is ready to
carry them on, merely by dressing a few men in uniform
and sending them out to patrol the streets, the sort of
thing that was the object of Pascal's ridicule and that
was, to his way of thinking, an evil, or something of an
evil, becomes to our way of thinking a potent good The
truth is, of course, that we do not really control vast
populations in this way. Pascal knew perfectly well that
the chancellor had force behind him. If he felt in his day
that medicine was an imaginary science, he would not
feel so today. After all, Pascal's understanding of the im-
agination was a part of his understanding of everything
else. As he lay dying, he experienced a violent convul-

Imagination as Value 135

sion. His sister, who attended him, described the scene
He had repeatedly asked that he might receive com-
munion. His sister wrote

God, who wished to reward a desire so fervent and so
just, suspended this convulsion as by a miracle and re-
stored his judgment completely as in the perfection of his
health, in a manner that the parish priest, entering into
his room with the sacrament, cried to him: ""Here is he
whom you have so much desired.'''' These words com-
pletely roused him and as the priest approached to give
him communion, he made an effort, he raised himself half
way without help to receive it with more respect; and
the priest having interrogated him, following the custom,
on the principal mysteries of the faith, he responded dis-
tinctly "Yes, monsieur, I believe all that with all my
heart " Then he received the sacred wafer and extreme
unction with feelings so tender that he poured out tears.
He replied to everything, thanked the priest and as the
priest blessed him with the holy cibonum, he said, "Let
God never forsake me. 11

Thus, in the very act of dying, he clung to what he him-
self had called the delusive faculty When I said a mo-
ment ago that he had never spoken well of it, I did not
overlook the fact that "this superb power, the enemy of
reason, 11 to use his own words, did not, and could not, al-
ways seem the same to him In a moment of indifference,
he said that the imagination disposes all things and that
it is the imagination that creates beauty, justice and hap-

I36 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

piness. In these various ways, the example of Pascal
demonstrates how the good of the imagination may be
evil and its evil good. The imagination is the power of
the mind over the possibilities of things; but if this con-
stitutes a certain single characteristic, it is the source not
of a certain single value but of as many values as reside
in the possibilities of things.

A second difficulty about value is the difference be-
tween the imagination as metaphysics and as a power of
the mind over external objects, that is to say, reality.
Ernst Cassirer in his An Essay on Man says:

In romantic thought the theory of -poetic imagination
had reached its climax. Imagination is no longer that spe-
cial human activity which builds up the human world of
art. It now has universal metaphysical value. Poetic im-
agination is the only clue to reality Fichte^s idealism is
based upon his conception of '"'"productive imagination "
Schelling declared in his System of Transcendental Ideal-
ism that art is the consummation of philosophy. In na-
ture, in morality, in history we are still living in the
< propylaeum of philosophical wisdom, m art we enter into
the sanctuary itself. The true poem is not the work of the
individual artist, it is the universe itself, the one work of
art which is forever perfecting itself.

Professor Cassirer speaks of this as "exuberant and
ecstatic praise of poetic imagination. 11 In addition, it is
the language of what he calls "romantic thought 11 and by

Imagination as Value 137

romantic thought he means metaphysics. When I speak
of the power of the mind over external objects I have m
mind, as external objects, works of art as, for example,
the sculptures of Michelangelo with what Walter Pater
calls "their wonderful strength verging, as in the things
of the imagination great strength always does, on what is
singular or strange, 11 or, in architecture, the formidable
public buildings of the British or the architecture and
decoration of churches, as, say, in the case of the Jesuit
church at Lucerne, where one might so easily pass from
the real to the visionary without consciousness of change.
Imagination, as metaphysics, leads us in one direction
and, as art, in another.

When we consider the imagination as metaphysics, we
realize that it is in the nature of the imagination itself that
we should be quick to accept it as the only clue to reality.
But alas ' we are no sooner so disposed than we encounter
the logical positivists. In Language, Truth and Logic,
Professor Ayer says that

it is fashionable to speak of the metaphysician as a kind
of misplaced poet. As his statements have no literal mean-
ing, they are not sub]ect to any criteria of truth or false-
hood; hut they may still seem to express, or arouse,
emotions, and thus be subject to ethical or aesthetic stand-
ards And it is suggested that they may have considerable
value, as means of moral inspiration, or even as works of
art In this way, an attempt is made to compensate the
metaphysician for his extrusion pom philosophy

I38 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

It appears from this that the imagination as metaphysics,
from the point of view of the logical positivist, has at
least seeming values During the last few months, the
New Statesman of London has been publishing letters
growing out of a letter sent to it by a visitor to Oxford,
who reported that Professor Avers book had "acquired
almost the status of a philosophic Bible " This led Pro-
fessor Joad to look up the book and see for himself. He
reported that the book teaches that

If . . . God is a metaphysical term, if, that is to say,
He belongs to a reality -which transcends the world of
sense-experience . . . to say that He exists is neither
true nor false. This position ... is neither atheist nor
agnostic, it cuts deeper than either, by asserting that all
talk about God, whether pro or anti, is twaddle.

What is true of one metaphysical term is true of all.

Then, too, before going on, we must somehow cleanse
the imagination of the romantic. We feel, without being
particularly intelligent about it, that the imagination as
metaphysics will survive logical positivism unscathed
At the same time, we feel, and with the sharpest possible
intelligence, that it is not worthy to survive if it is to be
identified with the romantic. The imagination is one of
the great human powers. The romantic belittles it. The
imagination is the liberty of the mind. The romantic is a
failure to make use of that liberty. It is to the imagination
what sentimentality is to feeling. It is a failure of the
imagination precisely as sentimentality is a failure of feel-

Imagination as Value 139

ing The imagination is the only genius It is intrepid and
eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstrac-
tion The achievement of the romantic, on the contrary,
lies m minor wish-fulfillments and it is incapable of ab-
straction. In any case and without continuing to contrast
the two things, one wants to elicit a sense of the imagina-
tion as something vital. In that sense one must deal with
it as metaphysics

If we escape destruction at the hands of the logical
positivists and if we cleanse the imagination of the taint
of the romantic, we still face Freud What would he have
said of the imagination as the clue to reality and of a cul-
ture based on the imagination? Before jumping to the
conclusion that at last there is no escape, is it not possible
that he might have said that in a civilization based on
science there could be a science of illusions ? He does in
fact say that "So long as a man's early years are influ-
enced by the religious thought-inhibition ... as well
as by the sexual one, we cannot really say what he is
actually like." If when the primacy of the intelligence
has been achieved, one can really say what a man is actu-
ally like, what could be more natural than a science of
illusions? Moreover, if the imagination is not quite the
clue to reality now, might it not become so then? As for
the present, what have we, if we do not have science,
except the imagination? And who is to say of its deliber-
ate fictions arising out of the contemporary mind that
they are not the forerunners of some such science? There
is more than the romantic in the statement that the true

140 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

work of art, whatever it may be, is not the work of the
individual artist. It is time and it is place, as these per-
fect themselves.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of
it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to
realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. One
way of demonstrating what it means to live in the mind is
to imagine a discussion of the world between two people
born blind, able to describe their images, so far as they
have images, without the use of images derived from
other people It would not be our world that would be
discussed Still another illustration may help A man in
Paris does not imagine the same sort of thing that a
native of Uganda imagines. If each could transmit his
imagination to the other, so that the man in Paris, lying
awake at night, could suddenly hear a footfall that meant
the presence of some inimical and merciless monstrosity,
and if the man in Uganda found himself in, say, the
Muenster at Basel and experienced what is to be experi-
enced there, what words would the Parisian find to fore-
stall his fate and what understanding would the Ugandan
have of his incredible delirium 5 If we live in the mind,
we live with the imagination. It is a commonplace to
realize the extent of artifice in the external world and to
say that Florence is more imaginative than Dublin, that
blue and white Munich is more imaginative than white
and green Havana, and so on; or to say that, in this town
no single public object of the imagination exists, while
in the Vatican City, say, no public object exists that is

Imagination as Value 141

not an object of the imagination What is engaging us
at the moment has nothing to do with the external world.
We are concerned with the extent of artifice within us
and, almost parenthetically, with the question of its
value.

What, then, is it to live in the mind with the imagina-
tion, yet not too near to the fountains of its rhetoric, so
that one does not have a consciousness only of grandeurs,
of incessant departures from the idiom and of inherent
altitudes? Only the reason stands between it and the real-
ity for which the two are engaged in a struggle We have
no particular interest in this struggle because we know
that it will continue to go on and that there will never be
an outcome. We lose sight of it until Pascal, or someone
else, reminds us of it. We say that it is merely a routine
and the more we think about it the less able we are to
see that it has any heroic aspects or that the spirit is at
stake or that it may involve the loss of the world. Is there
in fact any struggle at all and is the idea of one merely a
bit of academic junk? Do not the two carry on together in
the mind like two brothers or two sisters or even like
young Darby and young Joan? Darby says, "It is often
true that what is most rational appears to be most im-
aginative, as in the case of Picasso." Joan replies, "It is
often true, also, that what is most imaginative appears
to be most rational, as in the case of Joyce. Life is hard
and dear and it is the hardness that makes it dear." And
Darby says, "Speaking of Joyce and the co-existence of
opposites, do you remember the story that Joyce tells of

I42 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

Pascal m Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Stephen
said.

— Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his
mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex —

—Pascal was a pig— said Cranby.

— Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind —
Stephen said

— And he was another pig then — said Cranby.

— The church calls him a saint — Stephen ob]ected "

How is it that we should be speaking of the prize of
the spirit and of the loss, or gain, of the world, in con-
nection with the relations between reason and the imagi-
nation? It may be historically true that the reason of a
few men has always been the reason of the world Not-
withstanding this, we live today m a time dominated
by great masses of men and, while the reason of a few
men may underlie what they do, they act as their imagi-
nations impel them to act The world may, certainly, be
lost to the poet but it is not lost to the imagination. I
speak of the poet because we think of him as the orator
of the imagination And I say that the world is lost to
him, certainly, because, for one thing, the great poems
of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem
of the earth remains to be written. I suppose it is that
poem that will constitute the true prize of the spirit and
that until it is written many lesser things will be so re-
garded, including conquests that are not unimaginable
One wants to consider the imagination on its most mo-

Imagination as Value 143

mentous scale Today this scale is not the scale of poetry,
nor of any form of literature or art It is the scale of in-
ternational politics and in particular of communism.
Communism is not the measure of humanity. But I limit
myself to an allusion to it as a phenomenon of the im-
agination Surely the diffusion of communism exhibits
imagination on its most momentous scale This is be-
cause whether or not communism is the measure of hu-
manity, the words themselves echo back to us that it has
for the present taken the measure of an important part
of humanity. With the collapse of other beliefs, this
grubby faith promises a practicable earthly paradise The
only earthly paradise that even the best of other faiths
has been able to promise has been one in man's noblest
image and this has always required an imagination that
has not yet been included in the fortunes of mankind

The difference between an imagination that is engaged
by the materialism of communism and one that is en-
gaged by the projects of idealism is a difference in nature.
It is not that the imagination is versatile but that there
are different imaginations The commonest idea of an im-
aginative object is something large But apparently with
the Japanese it is the other way round and with them the
commonest idea of an imaginative object is something
small With the Hindu it appears to be something ver-
micular, with the Chinese, something round and with the
Dutch, something square. If these evidences do not estab-
lish the point, it can hardly be because the point needs
establishing A comparison between the Bible and poetry

144 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

is relevant. It cannot be said that the Bible, the most
widely distributed book in the world, is the poorest. Nor
can it be said that it owes its distribution to the poetry it
contains. If poetry should address itself to the same needs
and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the
Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution
Poetry does not address itself to beliefs. Nor could it
ever invent an ancient world full of figures that had been
known and become endeared to its readers for centuries
Consequently, when critics of poetry call upon it to do
some of the things that the Bible does, they overlook the
certainty that the Biblical imagination is one thing and
the poetic imagination, inevitably, something else. We
cannot look at the past or the future except by means of
the imagination but again the imagination of backward
glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead
something else. Even the psychologists concede this pres-
ent particular, for, with them, memory involves a repro-
ductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power
the power of our expectations When we speak of the
life of the imagination, we do not mean man's hf e as it is
affected by his imagination but the life of the faculty it-
self Accordingly, when we think of the permeation of
man's hfe by the imagination, we must not think of it as
a life permeated by a single thing but by a class of things
We use our imagination with respect to every man of
whom we take notice when by a glance we make up our
mind about him The differences so defined entail differ-
ences of value. The imagination that is satisfied by poh-

Imagination as Value 145

tics, whatever the nature of the politics, has not the same
value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say, the
universal mind, which, in the case of a poet, would be
the imagination that tries to penetrate to basic images,
basic emotions, and so to compose a fundamental poetry
even older than the ancient world Perhaps one drifts off
into rhetoric here, but then there is nothing more con-
genial than that to the imagination.

Of imaginative life as social form, let me distinguish at
once between everyday living and the activity of cultural
organization A theater is a social form but it is also a
cultural organization and it is not my purpose to discuss
the imagination as an institution Having in mind the
extent to which the imagination pervades life, it seems
curious that it does not pervade, or even create, social
form more widely It is an activity like seeing things or
hearing things or any other sensory activity Perhaps, if
one collected instances of imaginative life as social form
over a period of time, one might amass a prodigious num-
ber from among the customs of our lives Our social atti-
tudes, social distinctions and the insignia of social
distinctions are instances. A ceremonious baptism, a cere-
monious wedding, a ceremonious funeral are instances
It takes very little, however, to make a social form arising
from the imagination stand out from the normal, and the
fact that a form is abnormal is an argument for its sup-
pression. Normal people do not accept something ab-
normal because it has its origin in an abnormal force like
the imagination nor at all until they have somehow

146 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

normalized it as by familiarity. Costume is an instance of
imaginative life as social form At the same time it is an
instance of the acceptance of something incessantly ab-
normal by reducing it to the normal. It cannot be said
that life as we live it from day to day wears an imagina-
tive aspect On the other hand, it can be said that the
aspect of life as we live it from day to day conceals the
imagination as social form No one doubts that the forms
of daily living secrete within themselves an infinite va-
riety of things intelligible only to anthropologists nor that
lives, like our own, lived after an incalculable number of
preceding lives and in the accumulation of what they
have left behind are socially complicated even when they
appear to be socially innocent. To me, the accumula-
tion of lives at a university has seemed to be a subject
that might disclose something extraordinary What is the
residual effect of the years we spend at a university, the
years of imaginative life, if ever in our lives there are
such years, on the social form of our own future and on
the social form of the future of the world of which we
are part, when compared with the effects of our later
economic and political years?

The discussion of the imagination as metaphysics has
led us off a little to one side. This is justified, however,
by the considerations, first, that the operation of the im-
agination in life is more significant than its operation m
or in relation to works of art or perhaps I should have
said, from the beginning, in arts and letters, second, that
the imagination penetrates life; and finally, that its value

Imagination as Value 147

as metaphysics is not the same as its value in arts and
letters In spite of the prevalence of the imagination in
life-, it is probably true that the discussion of it m that
relation is incomparably less frequent and less intelligent
than the discussion of it in relation to arts and letters
The constant discussion of imagination and reality is
largely a discussion not for the purposes of life but for the
purposes of arts and letters I suppose that the reason for
this is that few people would turn to the imagination,
knowingly, in life, while few people would turn to any-
thing else, knowingly, in arts and letters. In life what is
important is the truth as it is, while in arts and letters
what is important is the truth as we see it. There is a
real difference here even though people turn to the im-
agination without knowing it in life and to reality with-
out knowing it in arts and letters. There are other pos-
sible variations of that theme but the theme itself is there
Again in life the function of the imagination is so varied
that it is not well-defined as it is in arts and letters.
In life one hesitates when one speaks of the value of the
imagination Its value in arts and letters is aesthetic
Most men's lives are thrust upon them. The existence of
aesthetic value in lives that are forced on those that live
them is an improbable sort of thing There can be lives,
nevertheless, which exist by the deliberate choice of
those that live them. To use a single illustration: it may
be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana is a life
in which the function of the imagination has had a func-
tion similar to its function in any deliberate work of art

148 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

or letters We have only to think of this present phase of
it, in which, in his old age, he dwells in the head of the
world, in the company of devoted women, in their con-
vent, and m the company of familiar saints, whose pres-
ence does so much to make any convent an appropriate
refuge for a generous and human philosopher. To repeat,
there can be lives in which the value of the imagination
is the same as its value in arts and letters and I exclude
from consideration as part of that statement any thought
of poverty or wealth, being a bauer or being a king, and
so on, as irrelevant.

The values of which it is common to think in relation
to life are ethical values or moral values. The Victorians
thought of these values in relation to arts and letters It
may be that the Russians mean to do about as the Vic-
torians did, that is to say, think of the values of life in
relation to arts and letters A social value is simply an
ethical value expressed by a member of the party. Be-
tween the wars, we lived, it may be said, in an era when
some attempt was made to apply the value of arts and
letters to life These excursions of values beyond their
spheres are part of a process which it is unnecessary to
delineate They are like the weather. We suffer from it
and enjoy it and never quite know the one feeling from
the other. It may, also, be altogether wrong to speak of
the excursions of values beyond their spheres, since the
question of the existence of spheres and the question of
what is appropriate to them are not settled. Thus, some-

Imagination as Value 149

thing said the other day, that "An objective theory of
value is needed in philosophy which does not depend
upon unanalysable intuitions but relates goodness, truth
and beauty to human needs in society," has a provocative
sound It is so easy for the poet to say that a learned man
must go on being a learned man but that a poet respects
no knowledge except his own and, again, that the poet
does not yield to the priest What the poet has in mind,
when he says things of this sort, is that poetic value is an
intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge It is not
the value of faith. It is the value of the imagination The
poet tries to exemplify it, in part, as I have tried to ex-
emplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative
activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives I say ex-
emplify and not justify, because poetic value is an in-
tuitional value and because intuitional values cannot be
justified. We cannot very well speak of spheres of value
and the transmission of a value, commonly considered
appropriate to one sphere, to another, and allude to the
peculiarity of roles, as the poet's role, without reminding
ourselves that we are speaking of a thing in continual
flux. There is no field in which this is more apparent than
painting. Again, there is no field in which it is more con-
stantly and more intelligently the subject of discussion
than painting. The permissible reality in painting wavers
with an insistence which is itself a value One might just
as well say the permissible imagination. It is as if the
painter carried on with himself a continual argument as

I50 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

to whether what delights us in the exercise of the mind
is what we produce or whether it is the exercise of a
power of the mind.

A generation ago we should have said that the imagi-
nation is an aspect of the conflict between man and na-
ture. Today we are more likely to say that it is an aspect
of the conflict between man and organized society It is
part of our security. It enables us to live our own lives
We have it because we do not have enough without it
This may not be true as to each one of us, for certainly
there are those for whom reality and the reason are
enough It is true of us as a race. A single, strong imagi-
nation is like a single, strong reason in this, that the ex-
treme good of each is a spiritual good. It is not possible
to say, as between the two, which is paramount. For
that matter it is not always possible to say that they are
two When does a building stop being a product of the
reason and become a product of the imagination? If we
raise a building to an imaginative height, then the build-
ing becomes an imaginative building since height in itself
is imaginative. It is the moderator of life as metempsy-
chosis was of death Nietzsche walked in the Alps in the
caresses of reality We ourselves crawl out of our offices
and classrooms and become alert at the opera Or we sit
listening to music as in an imagination in which we be-
lieve If the imagination is the faculty by which we im-
port the unreal into what is real, its value is the value
of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of
God into the idea of man. It creates images that are m-

Imagination as Value 151

dependent of their originals since nothing is more certain
than that the imagination is agreeable to the imagination.
When one's aunt in California writes that the geraniums
are up to her second-story window, we soon have them
running over the roof. All this diversity, which I have in-
tentionally piled up in confusion in this paragraph, is
typical of the imagination. It may suggest that the im-
agination is the ignorance of the mind Yet the imagina-
tion changes as the mind changes I know an Italian who
was a shepherd in Italy as a boy. He described his day's
work. He said that at evening he was so tired he would
lie down under a tree like a dog. This image was, of
course, an image of his own dog. It was easy for him
to say how tired he was by using the image of his tired
dog. But given another mind, given the mind of a man of
strong powers, accustomed to thought, accustomed to the
essays of the imagination, and the whole imaginative sub-
stance changes It is as if one could say that the imagina-
tion lives as the mind lives. The pnmitivism disappears.
The Platonic resolution of diversity appears. The world
is no longer an extraneous object, full of other extraneous
objects, but an image. In the last analysis, it is with this
image of the world that we are vitally concerned We
should not say, however, that the chief object of the im-
agination is to produce such an image. Among so many
objects, it would be the merest improvisation to say of
one, even though it is one with which we are vitally con-
cerned, that it is the chief The next step would be to as-
sert that a particular image was the chief image. Again, it

153 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

would be the merest improvisation to say of any image of
the world, even though it was an image with which a vast
accumulation of imaginations had been content, that it
was the chief image. The imagination itself would not
remain content with it nor allow us to do so. It is the ir-
repressible revolutionist.

In spite of the confusion of values and the diversity of
aspects, one arrives eventually face to face with arts and
letters I could take advantage of the pictures from the
Kaiser Friednch Museum in Berlin, which are being
exhibited throughout the country and which many of
you, no doubt, have seen. The pictures by Poussin are
not the most marvelous pictures in this collection Yet,
considered as objects of the imagination, how completely
they validate Gide's u We must approach Poussin little
by little" and how firmly they sustain the statement made
a few moments ago that the imagination is the only
genius There is also among these pictures a Giorgione,
the portrait of a young man, head and shoulders, in a
blue-purple blouse, or if not blue-purple, then a blue of
extraordinary enhancings. Vasan said of Giorgione that
he painted nothing that he had not seen in nature. This
portrait is an instance of a real object that is at the same
time an imaginative object It has about it an imaginative
bigness of diction. We know that in poetry bigness and
gaiety are precious characteristics of the diction. This
portrait transfers that principle to painting. The subject
is severe but its embellishment, though no less severe, is
big and gay and one feels in the presence of this work that

Imagination as Value 153

one is also in the presence of an abundant and joyous
spirit, instantly perceptible m what may be called the dic-
tion of the portrait. I could also take advantage, so far as
letters are concerned, of a few first books of poems or a
few first novels. One turns to first works of the imagina-
tion with the same expectation with which one turns to
last works of the reason. But I am afraid that although
one is, at last, face to face with arts and letters and,
therefore, in the presence of particulars beyond particu-
larization, it is prudent to limit discussion to a single
point.

My final point, then, is that the imagination is the
power that enables us to perceive the normal in the ab-
normal, the opposite of chaos in chaos. It does this every
day in arts and letters. This may seem to be a merely
capricious statement, for ordinarily we regard the im-
agination as abnormal per se. That point of view was
approached in the reference to the academic struggle be-
tween reason and the imagination and again in the refer-
ence to the relation between the imagination and social
form. The disposition toward a point of view derogatory
to the imagination is an aversion to the abnormal. We see
it in the common attitude toward modern arts and letters.
The exploits of Rimbaud in poetry, if Rimbaud can any
longer be called modern, and of Kafka in prose are de-
liberate exploits of the abnormal. It is natural for us to
identify the imagination with those that extend its ab-
normality. It is like identifying liberty with those that
abuse it. A literature overfull of abnormality and, cer-

154 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

tainly, present-day European literature, as one knows it,
seems to be a literature full of abnormality, gives the rea-
son an appearance of normality to which it is not, solely,
entitled The truth seems to be that we live in concepts
of the imagination before the reason has established them.
If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of
the imagination. It may be that the imagination is a mir-
acle of logic and that its exquisite divinations are calcula-
tions beyond analysis, as the conclusions of the reason
are calculations wholly within analysis If so, one under-
stands perfectly the remark that u in the service of love
and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime
or too festive " In the statement that we live in concepts
of the imagination before the reason has established
them, the word '■concepts" means concepts of normality.
Further, the statement that the imagination is the power
that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal is
a form of repetition of this statement One statement does
not demonstrate the other. The two statements together
imply that the instantaneous disclosures of living are dis-
closures of the normal This will seem absurd to those
that insist on the solitude and misery and terror of the
world They will ask o* what value is the imagination to
them, and if their experience is to be considered, how is
it possible to deny that they live in an imagination of
eviP Is evil normal or abnormal' And how do the ex-
quisite divinations of the poets and for that matter even
the "aureoles of the saints" help them' But when we

Imagination as Value 155

speak of perceiving the normal we have in mind the in-
stinctive integrations which are the reason for living Of
what value is anything to the solitary and those that live
in misery and terror., except the imagination?

Jean Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of
great sense He is a native of the region of Tarbes. Tarbes
is a town in southwestern France in the High Pyrenees
Marshal Foch was born there An equestrian statue of
the Marshal stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal.
In his Les Fhurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says

One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes,
this sign.

It is forbidden
To enter into the garden
Carrying flowers.

He goes on to say

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of literature.
Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of
Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red
poppy, an armful of red poppies

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense But
to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say:
the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love
and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagina-
tion. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden

156 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure cele-
brated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief
problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems
of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them,
everything that the imagination has to give.

The Relations

between Poetry and Painting

[ 159]

E.

/oger Fry concluded a note on Claude by saying
that u few of us live so strenuously as never to feel a sense
of nostalgia for that Saturnian reign to which Virgil and
Claude can waft us." He spoke in that same note of Corot
and Whistler and Chinese landscape and certainly he
might just as well have spoken, in relation to Claude, of
many poets, as, for example, Chenier or Wordsworth.
This is simply the analogy between two different forms of
poetry. It might be better to say that it is the identity of
poetry revealed as between poetry in words and poetry in
paint.

Poetry, however, is not limited to Virgilian landscape,
nor painting to Claude. We find the poetry of mankind
in the figures of the old men of Shakespeare, say, and the
old men of Rembrandt, or in the figures of Biblical
women, on the one hand, and of the madonnas of all Eu-
rope, on the other; and it is easy to wonder whether the
poetry of children has not been created by the poetry of
the Child, until one stops to think how much of the po-
etry of the whole world is the poetry of children, both as
they are and as they have been written of and painted,
as if they were the creatures of a dimension in which life

l6o THE NECESSARY ANGEL

and poetry are one. The poetry of humanity is, of course,
to be found everywhere.

There is a universal poetry that is reflected m every-
thing This remark approaches the idea of Baudelaire that
there exists an unascertained and fundamental aesthetic,
or order, of which poetry and painting are manifestations,
but of which, for that matter, sculpture or music or any
other aesthetic realization would equally be a manifesta-
tion Generalizations as expansive as these that there is
a universal poetry that is reflected in everything or that
there may be a fundamental aesthetic of which poetry
and painting are related but dissimilar manifestations, are
speculative. One is better satisfied by particulars.

No poet can have failed to recognize how often a de-
tail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies
also to poetry. The truth is that there seems to exist a
corpus of remarks in respect to painting, most often the
remarks of painters themselves, which are as significant
to poets as to painters All of these details, to the extent
that they have meaning for poets as well as for painters,
are specific instances of relations between poetry and
painting I suppose, therefore, that it would be possible
to study poetry by studying painting or that one could be-
come a painter after one had become a poet, not to speak
of carrying on in both metiers at once, with the economy
of genius, as Blake did. Let me illustrate this point of
the double value (and one might well call it the multi-
fold value) of sayings for painters that mean as much
for poets because they are, after all, sayings about art.

The Relations between Poetry and Painting 161

Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde
of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destruc-
tions? When Braque says u The senses deform., the mind
forms," he is speaking to poet, painter, musician and
sculptor. Just as poets can be affected by the sayings of
painters, so can painters be affected by the sayings of
poets and so can both be affected by sayings addressed to
neither. For many examples, see Miss SitwelTs Poet's
Note-Book These details come together so subdy and
so minutely that the existence of relations is lost sight
of This, in turn, dissipates the idea of their existence.

We may regard the subject, then, from two points of
view, the first from the point of view of the man whose
center is painting, whether or not he is a painter, the
second from the point of view of the man whose center is
poetry, whether or not he is a poet To make use of the
point of view of the man whose center is painting let me
refer to the chapter in Leo Steins Appreciation entitled
u On Reading Poetry and Seeing Pictures " He says that,
when he was a child, he became aware of composition in
nature and gradually realized that art and composition are
one He began to experiment as follows:

I put on the table . . . an earthenware plate . . .
and this I looked at every day for minutes or for hours.
I had in mind to see it as a picture, and waited for it to
become one In time it did The change came suddenly

1 62, THE NECESSARY ANGEL

'when the plate as an inventonal object ... a certain
shape, certain colors applied to it . . . went over into
a composition to which all these elements were merely
contributory. The painted composition on the plate ceased
to be on it but became a part of a larger composition
which was the plate as a whole I had made a beginning
to seeing pictorially.

What had been begun was carried out in all directions.
I wanted to be able to see anything as a composition and
found that it was possible to do this.

He improvised a definition of art. that it is nature seen
in the light of its significance, and recognizing that this
significance was one of forms he added "formal" to "sig-
nificance."

Turning to education in hearing, he observed that
there is nothing comparable to the practice in composi-
tion that the visible world offers By composition he
meant the compositional use of words- the use of their
existential meamngs Composition was his passion. He
considered that a formally complete picture is one in
which all the parts are so related to one another that they
all imply each other. Finally he said, "an excellent il-
lustration is the line from Wordsworth's Michael . .
'And never lifted up a single stone. 1 " One might say of
a lazy workman, "He's been out there, just loafing, for
an hour and never lifted up a single stone, 11 and no one
would think this great poetry. . These lines would
have no existential value; they would simply call atten-

The Relations between Poetry and Painting 163

tion to the lazy workman But the compositional use by
Wordsworth of his line makes it something entirely dif-
ferent These simple words become weighted with the
tragedy of the old shepherd, and are saturated with po-
etry. Their referential importance is slight, for the im-
portance of the action to which they refer is not in the ac-
tion itself, but in the meaning, and that meaning is borne
by the words. Therefore this is a line of great poetry.

The selection of composition as a common denomina-
tor of poetry and painting is the selection of a technical
characteristic by a man whose center was painting, even
granting that he was not a man whom one thinks of as
a technician Poetry and painting alike create through
composition.

Now, a poet looking for an analogy between poetry
and painting and trying to take the point of view of a
man whose center is poetry begins with a sense that the
technical pervades painting to such a degree that the two
are identified This is untrue, since, if painting was
purely technical, that conception of it would exclude the
artist as a person. I want to say something, therefore,
based on the sensibility of the poet and of the painter I
am not quite sure that I know what is meant by sensibil-
ity I suppose that it means feeling or, as we say, the feel-
ings I know what is meant by nervous sensibility, as,
when at a concert, the auditors, having composed them-
selves and resting there attentively, hear suddenly an out-
burst on the trumpets from which they shrink by way of
a nervous reaction. The satisfaction that we have when

164 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

we look out and find that it is a fine day or when we are
looking at one of the limpid vistas of Corot in the pays de
Corot seems to be something else. It is commonly said
that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibil-
ity We began with the conjunction of Claude and Virgil,
noting how one evoked the other Such evocations are
attributable to similarities of sensibility If, in Claude, we
find ourselves in the realm of Saturn, the ruler of the
world in a golden age of innocence and plenty, and if, in
Virgil, we find ourselves in the same realm, we recognize
that there is, as between Claude and Virgil, an identity
of sensibility Yet if one questions the dogma that the
origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility and if
one says that a fortunate poem or a fortunate painting is
a synthesis of exceptional concentration (that degree of
concentration that has a lucidity of its own, in which we
see clearly what we want to do and do it instantly and
perfectly) , we find that the operative force within us does
not, in fact, seem to be the sensibility, that is to say,
the feelings. It seems to be a constructive faculty, that
derives its energy more from the imagination than from
the sensibility I have spoken of questioning, not of deny-
ing The mind retains experience, so that long after the
experience, long after the winter clearness of a January
morning, long after the limpid vistas of Corot, that fac-
ulty within us of which I have spoken makes its own
constructions out of that experience. If it merely recon-
structed the experience or repeated for us our sensations
in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really

The Relations between Poetry and Painting 165

does is to use it as material with which it does whatever
it wills This is the typical function of the imagination
which always makes use of the familiar to produce the
unfamiliar What these remarks seem to involve is the
substitution for the idea of inspiration of the idea of an
effort of the mind not dependent on the vicissitudes of
the sensibility It is so completely possible to sit at one 1 s
table and without the help of the agitation of the feelings
to write plays of incomparable enhancement that that is
precisely what Shakespeare did. He was not dependent
on the fortuities of inspiration. It is not the least part of
his glory that one can say of him, the greater the thinker
the greater the poet It would come nearer the mark to
say the greater the mind the greater the poet, because
the evil of thinking as poetry is not the same thing as
the good of thinking in poetry. The point is that the poet
does his job by virtue of an effort of the mind In doing
so, he is in rapport with the painter, who does his job,
with respect to the problems of form and color, which
confront him incessantly, not by inspiration, but by im-
agination or by the miraculous kind of reason that the
imagination sometimes promotes. In short, these two
arts, poetry and painting, have in common a laborious
element, which, when it is exercised, is not only a labor
but a consummation as well For proof of this let me set
side by side the poetry in the prose of Proust, taken from
his vast novel, and the painting, by chance, of Jacques
Villon. As to Proust, I quote a paragraph from Professor
Saurat

1 66 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

Another -province he has added to literature is the de-
scription of those eternal moments in which we are lifted
out of the drab world. . . . The madeleine dipped in
tea., the steeples of Martinville, some trees on a road, a
perfume of wild flowers, a vision of light and shade on
trees, a spoon clinking on a plate that is like a railway
mans hammer on the wheels of the train from which the
trees were seen, a stiff napkin in an hotel, an inequality
in two stones in Venice and the dispintment in the yard
of the Guermantes' 1 town house. . . .

As to Villon* shortly before I began to write these notes
I dropped into the Carre Gallery in New York to see an
exhibition of paintings which included about a dozen
works by him I was immediately conscious of the pres-
ence of the enchantments of intelligence in all his pris-
matic material. A woman lying in a hammock was
transformed into a complex of planes and tones, radiant,
vaporous, exact A tea-pot and a cup or two took their
place in a reality composed wholly of things unreal
These works were dehciae of the spirit as distinguished
from delectationes of the senses and this was so because
one found in them the labor of calculation, the appetite
for perfection.

3

One of the characteristics of modern art is that it is un-
compromising In this it resembles modern politics, and
perhaps it would appear on study, including a study of

The Relations between Poetry and Tainting 167

the rights of man and of women's hats and dresses, that
everything modern, or possibly merely new, is, in the na-
ture of things, uncompromising It is especially uncom-
promising in respect to precinct One of the De Gon-
courts said that nothing in the world hears as many silly
things said as a picture in a museum; and in thinking
about that remark one has to bear in mind that in the days
of the De Goncourts there was no such thing as a mu-
seum of modern art A really modern definition of modern
art, instead of making concessions, fixes limits which
grow smaller and smaller as time passes and more often
than not come to include one man alone, just as if there
should be scrawled across the facade of the building in
which we now are, the words Cezanne delineavit. An-
other characteristic of modern art is that it is plausible.
It has a reason for everything Even the lack of a reason
becomes a reason. Picasso expresses surprise that people
should ask what a picture means and says that pictures
are not intended to have meanings. This explains every-
thing Still another characteristic of modern art is that it
is bigoted. Every painter who can be defined as a modern
painter becomes, by virtue of that definition, a freeman of
the world of art and hence the equal of any other modern
painter. We recognize that they differ one from another
but in any event they are not to be judged except by other
modern painters.

We have this inability (not mere unwillingness) to
compromise, this same plausibility and bigotry in modern
poetry To exhibit this, let me divide modern poetry into

1 68 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

two classes, one that is modern in respect to what it
says, the other that is modern in respect to form The
first kind is not interested primarily in form The second
is. The first kind is interested in form but it accepts a
banality of form as incidental to its language Its justifica-
tion is that in expressing thought or feeling in poetry the
purpose of the poet must be to subordinate the mode of
expression, that, while the value of the poem as a poem
depends on expression, it depends primarily on what is
expressed Whether the poet is modern or ancient, living
or dead, is, in the last analysis, a question of what he is
talking about, whether of things modern or ancient, liv-
ing or dead The counterpart of Villon in poetry, writing
as he paints, would concern himself with like things (but
not necessarily confining himself to them), creating the
same sense of aesthetic certainty, the same sense of ex-
quisite realization and the same sense of being modern
and living. One sees a good deal of poetry, thanks, per-
haps, to Mallarme's Un Coup de Des, in which the ex-
ploitation of form involves nothing more than the use of
small letters for capitals, eccentric line-endings, too little
or too much punctuation and similar aberrations These
have nothing to do with being alive They have nothing
to do with the conflict between the poet and that of
which his poems are made. They are neither "bonne
soupe" nor "beau langage. 1 ' 1

What I have said of both classes of modern poetry
is inadequate as to both As to the first, which permits a
banality of form, it is even harmful, as suggesting that it

The Relations between Poetry and Painting i<5o

possesses less of the artifice of trie poet than the second.
Each of these two classes is intransigent as to the other.
If one is disposed to think well of the class that stands on
what it has to say, one has only to think of Gide^s re-
mark, "Without the unequaled beauty of his prose, who
would continue to interest himself in Bossuet 5 " 11 The divi-
sion between the two classes, the division, say, between
Valery and Apollinaire, is the same division into factions
that we find everywhere in modern painting But aes-
thetic creeds, like other creeds, are the certain evidences
of exertions to find the truth I have tried to say no more
than was necessary to evince the relations, in which we
are interested, as they exist in the manifestations of today.
What, when all is said and done, is the significance of the
existence of such relations? Or is it enough to note them?
The question is not the same as the question of the sig-
nificance of art We do not have to be told of the sig-
nificance of art. "It is art, 11 said Henry James, "which
makes life, makes interest, makes importance . . . and
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty
of its process." The world about us would be desolate ex-
cept for the world within us. There is the same inter-
change between these two worlds that there is between
one art and another, migratory passings to and fro, quick-
enings, Promethean liberations and discoveries.

Yet it may be that just as the senses are no respecters
of reality, so the faculties are no respecters of the arts.
On the other hand, it may be that we are dealing with
something that has no significance, something that is the

170 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

result of imitation Quatremere de Quincy distinguished
between the poet and the painter as between two imi-
tators, one moral, the other physical. There are imitations
within imitations and the relations between poetry and
painting may present nothing more This idea makes it
possible, at least, to see more than one side of the subject.

4
All of the relations of which I have spoken are them-
selves related in the deduction that the vis poetica, the
power of poetry, leaves its mark on whatever it touches.
The mark of poetry creates the resemblance of poetry as
between the most disparate things and unites them all m
its recognizable virtue. There is one relation between po-
etry and painting which does not participate in the com-
mon mark of common origin. It is the paramount relation
that exists between poetry and people in general and be-
tween painting and people in general. I have not over-
looked the possibility that, when this evening's subject
was suggested, it was intended that the discussion should
be limited to the relations between modern poetry and
modern painting This would have involved much tin-
kling of familiar cymbals In so far as it would have called
for a comparison of this poet and that painter, this school
and that school, it would have been fragmentary and be-
yond my competence. It seems to me that the subject of
modern relations is best to be approached as a whole The
paramount relation between poetry and painting today,
between modern man and modern art is simply this that

The Relations between Poetry and Tainting 171

in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or,
if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry
and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their meas-
ure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that
the imagination is the next greatest power to faith, the
reigm'ng prince Consequently their interest in the im-
agination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of
humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which
nothing but the self remains, if that remains So regarded,
the study of the imagination and the study of reality come
to appear to be purified, aggrandized, fateful. How much
stature, even vatic stature, this conception gives the
poet! He need not exercise this dignity in vatic works.
How much authenticity, even orphic authenticity, it
gives to the painter' He need not display this authenticity
m orphic works. It should be enough for him that that to
which he has given his life should be so enriched by such
an access of value Poet and painter alike live and work in
the midst of a generation that is experiencing essential
poverty in spite of fortune. The extension of the mind be-
yond the range of the mind, the projection of reality be-
yond reality, the determination to cover the ground,
whatever it may be, the determination not to be confined,
the recapture of excitement and intensity of interest, the
enlargement of the spirit at every time, in every way,
these are the unities, the relations, to be summarized as
paramount now. It is not material whether these relations
exist consciously or unconsciously. One goes back to the
coercing influences of time and place. It is possible to be

172 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

subjected to a lofty purpose and not to know it. But I
think that most men of any degree of sophistication, most
poets, most painters know it.

When we look back at the period of French classicism
in the seventeenth century, we have no difficulty in see-
ing it as a whole. It is not so easy to see one's own time
that way. Pretty much all of the seventeenth century, in
France, at least, can be summed up in that one word,
classicism. The paintings of Poussin, Claude's contempo-
rary, are the inevitable paintings of the generation of
Racine. If it had been a time when dramatists used the
detailed scene directions that we expect today, the direc-
tions of Racine would have left one wondering whether
one was reading the description of a scene or the descrip-
tion of one of Poussin's works. The practice confined
them to the briefest generalization. Thus, after the list
of persons in King Lear, Shakespeare added only two
words- "Scene: Britain " Yet even so, the directions of
Racine, for all their brevity, suggest Poussin. That a com-
mon quality is to be detected in such simple things ex-
hibits the extent of the interpenetration persuasively. The
direction for Britannicus is "The scene is at Rome, in a
chamber of the palace of Nero"; for Iphigeme en Auhde,
"The scene is at Aulis, before the tent of Agamemnon",
for Phedre, "The scene is at Trezene, a town of the Pelo-
ponnesus"; for Esther, "The scene is at Susa, in the pa-
lais of Assuerus"; and for Athalie, "The scene is in the
temple of Jerusalem, in a vestibule of the apartment of
the grand priest."

The Relations between Poetry and Painting 173

Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three
generations, including our own, can be summed up in a
way that brings into unity an immense number of details
by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the
supreme truth has been a search in reality or through real-
ity or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.
Juan Gris began some notes on his painting by saying:
"The world from which I extract the elements of reality
is not visual but imaginative." The history of this attitude
in literature and particularly in poetry, in France, has
been traced by Marcel Raymond m his From Baudelaire
to Surrealism. I say particularly in poetry because there
are associated with it the names of Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Mallarme and Valery In painting, its history is the his-
tory of modern painting Moreover, I say in France be-
cause, in France, the theory of poetry is not abstract as
it so often is with us, when we have any theory at all, but
is a normal activity of the poet's mind in surroundings
where he must engage in such activity or be extirpated
Thus necessity develops an awareness and a sense of
fatality which give to poetry values not to be reproduced
by indifference and chance. To the man who is seeking
the sanction of life in poetry, the namby-pamby is an in-
tolerable dissipation. The theory of poetry, that is to say,
the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become
in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique.
The reason for this must by now be clear The reason is
the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern
art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a

174 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of
saying and of establishing that all things, whether below
or above appearance, are one and that it is only through
reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined
together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, real-
ity changes from substance to sublety, a sublety m which
it was natural for Ce'zanne to say. "I see planes bestrid-
ing each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me
to fall" or "Planes in color. . . . The colored area where
shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the
kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight "
The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this
It was from the point of view of another subtlety that
Klee could write: "But he is one chosen that today comes
near to the secret places where original law fosters all
evolution And what artist would not establish himself
there where the organic center of all movement in time
and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation
—determines every function. 1,1 Conceding that this sounds
a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow
to those that have helped to create a new reality, a mod-
ern reality, since what has been created is nothing less.

This reality is, also, the momentous world of poetry.
Its instantaneities are the familiar intelligence of poets,
although it has been the intelligence of another ambiance.
Simone Weil in La Pesanteur et La Grace has a chapter
on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is
making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that

The Relations between Poetry and Painting 175

destruction is making pass from the created to nothing-
ness Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which
our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the
precious portents of our own powers The greatest truth
we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discov-
ered it, is that man's truth is the final resolution of every-
thing Poets and painters alike today make that assump-
tion and this is what gives them the validity and serious
dignity that become them as among those that seek wis-
dom, seek understanding. I am elevating this a little, be-
cause I am trying to generalize and because it is incredi-
ble that one should speak of the aspirations of the last
two or three generations without a degree of elevation.
Sometimes it seems the other way Sometimes we hear
it said that m the eighteenth century there were no poets
and that the painters — Chardin, Fragonard, Watteau —
were elegants and nothing more; that in the nineteenth
century the last great poet was the man that looked most
like one and that the whole Pierian sodality had better
have been fed to the dogs. It occasionally seems like that
today It must seem as it may. In the logic of events, the
only wrong would be to attempt to falsify the logic, to
be disloyal to the truth. It would be tragic not to realize
the extent of mans dependence on the arts. The kind of
world that might result from too exclusive a dependence
on them has been questioned, as if the discipline of the
arts was in no sense a moral discipline We have not to
discuss that here. It is enough to have brought poetry and

I76 THE NECESSARY ANGEL

painting into relation as sources of our present concep-
tion of reality, without asserting that they are the sole
sources, and as supports of a kind of life, which it seems
to be worth living, with their support, even if doing so is
only a stage in the endless study of an existence, which is
the heroic subject of all study.

TYPE NOTE

This book is set in an experimental Linotype face
called Stuyvesant. The roman characters are
based on a type face cut by Jacques Francois Rosart
(1714-77) at Haarlem about the year 1750. The
italic is a new design, drawn in harmony with the
Rosart feeling

The booh was composed, printed, and bound by
The Plimpton Press, Norwood, Massachusetts. The
typography and binding are by W. A. Dwiggins,
the designer of Stuyvesant type.

Ci

WvD